The link doesn't work.

Oyy. After seven years of saying 'I don't need a cellphone' I was just beginning to change my mind.

the bee thing has been widely debunked this week. Bee colonies have been suddenly and inexplicably dying out in waves for at least a hundred years.

Debunked? How about a couple of links.

I went a-Googlin' about the bee problem. It seems there is a lot of useless, sensationalist crap being blared out by most of the press, so its hard to tell what's really going on at this point. Here are some articles I found that aren't just "onoes cellphones have doomed us all":

Farmnews - Bee killer might not be new

Article on bee problem by Canadian Press - Good article, lots of info. Some tidbit exerpts:

But Brent Halsall, president of the Ontario Beekeepers' Association, said there are a lot of notions about what's causing bee colonies to dissolve like honey in a hot cup of tea.

High-frequency electromagnetic radiation from cellphones could be a factor, he acknowledged, but so could many other influences.

"Everybody's got their own little pet theory, but it's really hard to say," Halsall said from his home just south of Ottawa, where he keeps about 200 hives.

... "I think weather might be one of the big factors this year," Halsall said. "We had a very warm winter until mid-January and then, bang, it got cold."

... Still, he thinks that whatever the causes of honeybee deaths in Ontario, and likely in the rest of Canada, they are different from those decimating hives in the United States.

I really liked this clip.

Maher has been semi-annoying me for the last few weeks, but I felt he was spot on for this one.

A+.

I'm sorry but Bill Maher did a terrible job of highlighting a serious problem by scaring us for all the wrong reasons (sounds familiar).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/11/AR2007021100650.html http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/business/27bees.html?ex=1330232400&en=3aaa0148837b8977&ei=5088 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6400179.stm

This IS a serious problem and one that we should all be paying attention to but Maher has to stop using the same tactics as the Right. It reminds me of the whole breast implant debacle.

Some of you people are fools, (and i mean that in the kindest sense of the word, except for you EvolutionKills).

Bill isn't saying that cell phones ARE KILLING TEH BEES! No, he's saying that a recent study shows that it could be ONE of the reasons for this bee dieoff, and would you give up your cellphone if it made a difference? He's making a point about our consumer capitalist culture that is more worried about cell phone reception than entire populations of bees falling dead from mysterious reasons.

You are all calling Mahr out because "he doesn't understand this", well, no one does. Nobody knows for sure why the bees are dying off, which is frightening to me, and should be to everyone. It seems like something so small right now, but like he says, this could be the canarie in the coal mine.

"the bee thing has been widely debunked this week. Bee colonies have been suddenly and inexplicably dying out in waves for at least a hundred years."

Right, we know nothing about why the bees are dying en-masse, but it has been debunked? Please let them know at the EU agrarian comission which is been freaking out for the past few months about the fact that almost 1/8th of the bee population in western Europe has vanished. If only all these scientist had your googling powress.

It is a problem, and we kow jack shit about. How can you debunk something that we know nothing about?

How can something that we know nothing about be already debunked? Some people surely take comfort in denial...

This is like the people who continue smoking because there is a doctor somewhere who claimed the link between putting poisonous gas into your lungs and cancer is not a well stablished link. Proof by counter example only works in math, not in real life.

When the bees are dying en-masse something is clearly off whack. Simply saying that this is natural, when we don't even understand the facts on bee dissapearance is not really an MO for any serious person with scientific background.

where did he get the einstein quote from?

"How can something that we know nothing about be already debunked?"

If we know nothing about it, how do we know it's a problem? How do we know it isn't a normal cycle? How do we know it is something man made?

Bill mentioned on a recent show that he thought cell phones were the cause of bees becoming disoriented and becoming lost. Unfortunately, it's much worse than that. The cause is actually the decline of the strength of the Earth's magnetic field, a phenomena that is beyond our capability to change. It's been known for some time that bees use the sun and the Earth's magnetic field to navigate. Unfortunately, the Earth's magnetic field is not a constant and has been decreasing by 7% a century for some time. It will eventually go to zero and then flip to the opposite polarity. Many of my fellow scientists have long said that we shouldn't worry about this fact because we won't even notice when it happens. I think we're noticing.