Bees dying because of quantum reactions?

Nathyn

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Article here

I read this story on Digg and it seemed a little off. The introduction to the article seemed like a set-up for bad reasoning. The article is laced with technical terminology that I can't debunk.

I figured it's something somebody here could confirm or denounce.
 
Lets start with the coincidence of the bees dying out 50 years ago....

Pesticides and Honey Bee Mortality
Many major agricultural changes took place in the 1950's, shortly after World War II, when tractors replaced horses, chemical fertilizers replaced organic manure, aerial application of pesticides became commonplace, and farmers became increasingly conscious of business costs. At the same time, many farmers were encouraged to devote large acreages to the cultivation of a single crop, which necessitated the utilization of large quantities of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to nourish and protect that crop. Consumers also came to expect all market fruits and vegetables to be completely free from insects and insect damage.

Thus, many growers found it advantageous to apply more and more pesticides each year. Unfortunately, some aspects of this agricultural modernization were not beneficial for beekeepers, whose needs were either frequently forgotten or ignored. Consequently, many honey bees were killed.
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Yep, this looks like a quantum effect :boggled:
 
I would say, IF the loss reports hold up under real research AND are shown to be qualitatively different than regular and/or pesticide driven die-offs that an investigation/further investigation might be in order. That it is quantum related is extremely unlikely - though that someone can find something in all the real and spurious information out there about quantum theory that would be resolvable into a pattern/pattern set is quite likely given the well known human tendency to create patterns where none actually exist.
 
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Wow, this article's premise is supremely off-base. The bee recruitment "dance" isn't "overly-complex" in any way; it's ridiculously simple to decipher; and even kids can be quickly taught to physically locate food sources indicated by dancing bees in an observation hive.

Explanation.
 
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I read a bee dance once watching a cluster of my bees. I figured out the direction and guessed that the distance was a couple of miles. Then the whole cluster took flight, elongated along the line to their destination, then took off. It was a lot like they just disappear because up close you see bees flying in both directions and the swarm just thins out until you don't see them any more.

The dance is so well known that it is possible to use a computer controlled simulation to show the bees where the food source is.
 
I gotta admit for an (checks time stamp) April Fool joke this had me going for a bit.

If this were not enough, the results imply that bees can perceive quarks, thereby interacting with the quantum world without disturbing it in the ways both observed and predicted by quantum theory. And this perception would have to extend to the perception of quarks not as coherent structures, but as fields. In other words, bees may be able to perceive the unobserved quantum fields of zero-point energy, the much-debated property from which all of the phenomenal world may emerge in the eternal quantum moment.
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:D
 
The article makes so many leaps of logic beyond the normal bounds of human ability, I believe that its authors were using performance reducing drugs. Jumping from a proposed ability to detect EM fields to the ability to detect quarks (unbound naturally occuring quarks? At normal energies? In beehives?)...
 
I wonder if we can set up a bee quark-detector array.

Bees: "There's damn quarks everywhere!"

This would have been a significant result not that long ago.
 
I agree with Dan O. The very recent bee die off (where the bees leave the hive as usual, but never come back) seems to be related to a specific pesticide that is also used against termites with a similar mechanism (individuals leave the nest and fail to return). I heard a story about this on NPR, and they said that the chemical in question was already banned in Europe because it's the primary suspect.
 
Flowers and fruit facing disaster as disease kills off bees

Devastating diseases are killing off UK Honeybee colonies this winter at twice the usual rate or worse, threatening major ecological and economic problems. At fault is either Colony Collapse Disorder, a disease that has already decimated 50% of US colonies, or a new, resistant form of the Varroa destructor bee parasite. Almost 30% of UK hives inspected have been lost – against the normal 15% – and the problem may deepen, as many beekeepers have yet to check their hives.
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http://newstandardnews.net/content/ion/index.cfm/bulletin/6832
 
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