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mhuzzellAs ever more agricultural land is used to grow fuel instead of food, all agriculture may soon become less productive due to the loss of bees. Yeah, the bees are dying, or disappearing, en masse. I have a laptop with an inbuilt wireless card. Since I started using high speedz internet, I seldom read for pleasure and my attention span has dwindled down from a lenghty, mighty and powerful focus to a half-absentminded 30 seconds (even now, I have two other tabs open and I'm listening to music while drinking chemical coffee, which I use to replace all the sleep I skip in my busybusy life). I can barely cook, and my instant porridge exploded in the microwave.
What do all these things have to do with each other? Maybe nothing. But this morning, I was leafing through the newspaper and came across an article with a possible explanation for the Case of the Disappearing Bees: radio waves. And television signals, mobile phone signals, WiFi, microwaves, and all the other ambient radiation constantly bombarding the poor li'l bees. It stresses them out, which weakens their immune systems, making them more vulnerable to diseases and to the sprays that cover the crops they're sent out to pollinate. It may also make them less able to do their bee-dance to communicate.
Fortunately, there's a solution: little boxes called 'bioemitters' placed under domestic hives that emit steady, low-frequency radiation, blocking out the cacophony of signals that had so flustered them previously. It has the added bonus of being intolerable to a certain type of mite that tends to plague European bees. As a technilogical solution, it's fairly brilliant, but as a treatment it's downright alarming. What happens to the wild bees? Surely many wild plants are dependent on them for pollination, and they'll be exposed to nearly as much ambient radiation as the field-bees. Surely the healthier solution would be to try to cut down on the ambient radiation and, better yet, the herbicides, insecticides and fungicides that get pissed over all the crops.
Flipping over the page, I found one of those sensationalist medical stories about a hidden epidemic. This one was about how tens of thousands (tens of thousands!) of children in Scotland could be going about with undiagnosed 'mild to severe' ADHD. Oh, the horror! Meanwhile, I keep finding out that friends of mine -- friends my own age, ours being the first generation to have grown up with an awareness of such disorders -- are on Adderall. What? Anyway, the article goes on to suggest that many of these tenthousands of unfortunate children could benefit from 'drug therapy', which could "dramatically improve the quality of life for families". Note that: 'families', not the children themselves.
Buzz, buzz.
What do all these things have to do with each other? Maybe nothing. But this morning, I was leafing through the newspaper and came across an article with a possible explanation for the Case of the Disappearing Bees: radio waves. And television signals, mobile phone signals, WiFi, microwaves, and all the other ambient radiation constantly bombarding the poor li'l bees. It stresses them out, which weakens their immune systems, making them more vulnerable to diseases and to the sprays that cover the crops they're sent out to pollinate. It may also make them less able to do their bee-dance to communicate.
Fortunately, there's a solution: little boxes called 'bioemitters' placed under domestic hives that emit steady, low-frequency radiation, blocking out the cacophony of signals that had so flustered them previously. It has the added bonus of being intolerable to a certain type of mite that tends to plague European bees. As a technilogical solution, it's fairly brilliant, but as a treatment it's downright alarming. What happens to the wild bees? Surely many wild plants are dependent on them for pollination, and they'll be exposed to nearly as much ambient radiation as the field-bees. Surely the healthier solution would be to try to cut down on the ambient radiation and, better yet, the herbicides, insecticides and fungicides that get pissed over all the crops.
Flipping over the page, I found one of those sensationalist medical stories about a hidden epidemic. This one was about how tens of thousands (tens of thousands!) of children in Scotland could be going about with undiagnosed 'mild to severe' ADHD. Oh, the horror! Meanwhile, I keep finding out that friends of mine -- friends my own age, ours being the first generation to have grown up with an awareness of such disorders -- are on Adderall. What? Anyway, the article goes on to suggest that many of these tenthousands of unfortunate children could benefit from 'drug therapy', which could "dramatically improve the quality of life for families". Note that: 'families', not the children themselves.
Buzz, buzz.
