Cell phones possibly causing death of honey bees

BTW, I saw two bumblebees this past week, on the same bush.

Had some keeping me company while I worked outside all day :-D

It's the fault of all those people that put a bee in their bonnet

One can only wonder at the overall damage to insects and the ecology caused by the widespread use of pesticides.

I've noticed large numbers of butterflies on my compost pile, especially hackberry butterflies. I started putting out mashed bananas and their peels as an extra food source and have attracted many more including commas, red admirals, and an elegant hairstreak.

What I've notice is a disturbing percentage of butterflies with malformed wings, not ragged, but malformed either from genetic mutation or from some problem at the pupal stage. There was a comma with almost no hind wings that has been feed at the pile for a week.


Comma butterfly so name for the white comma on the underside of the hind wings--lower picture.





Hackberry butterfly

Are we supposed to be alarmed at the collapse of the honey bee-pollinated factory farms? There are, perhaps, thousands of species of bee, flies, and other pollinators that have been extirpated locally in huge agricultural areas that use a system of heavy pesticide application, which kill off all native pollinators, with a respite when the plants are flowering and the honey bee hives are brought in to pollinate the crops. Native pollinating insects are not only killed off, they are deprived of food to allow a viable population to exist. Who knows how many years or decades it would take for these insects to regain viable populations large enough to replace the pollination done by domesticated honey bees. This is assuming that the enormous chemical food farms would be interested inconverting to organic farming. They probably wouldn't on a large scale with the result the affected vegetables and fruit would have to be imported.

It takes years to convert a chemical farm to an organic one, and this would bite into the profits of the corporate farms.

Why can't cell phones kill Yellowjackets instead or Honey Bees. I just got done exterminating a Yellowjacket nest in a hole in my back yard. The little bastards stung my dog (twice) when she wasn't doing anything except walking by. So I annihilated the entire colony. Good riddance.