Oh no. A Swiss Research team conducted 83 experiments and found that mobile phone calls cause bees to leave their hive, become disoriented and die.


The researchers measured the reaction of a bee hive to a mobile phone when it was actively in a call, in standby mode and turned off. According to the article published in the bee journal Apidologie, the bees responded violently to a mobile phone when it was in a call. They hive began to make a noise called the working piping signal which caused the bees to swarm. Disoriented by the noise, the colony fled their hive, flew erratically and suddenly died. This response was not observed when the phone was off or in an idle state.

Earlier studies blamed the Israeli acute paralysis virus for the massive bee colony deaths reported around the world. Besides protecting their hives from this virus, this Swiss study suggests beekeepers should probably stop yakking on their phone when tending to their hive. [Via The Daily Mail]