Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

I'm all for saving the bees!


...but if you could figure out a way to eliminate the 'love bug', you could make some serious coin i bet! I heard the love bug was man made to rid sugar cane crops of pesky birds. The birds were suppose to eat the bug and not the plant. May be nonsense, i don't know

 

the news out now is that this bee thing is a virus, not cellphones, not evil humans.

another example of how we like to blame ourselves for every environmental thing, because we have environmental human guilt syndrome.

solution: wait for bees to die off and be replaced by bees who resist the virus. like most environmental problems, this requires no human intervention.

let's just let nature manage itself instead. any effort on our part would almost certainly be counterproductive. environmental guilt syndrome is a problem inside our heads, not the environment.

 

RED!!! YOU'RE BACK!

we missed you.


ok, back to bees.

 

i know, this is evolution. some creatures live, others do not. 99% of creatures that ever existed are extinct. they were not as well-adapted, and we should not mourn their passing, because they paved the way for us. it is a waste of our time to worry about the natural comings and goings of species.

i understand this. what i am saying is that these systems are better off without our intervention, because we often do not really understand the factors involved. for instance, we thought cellphones were killing the bees. that was just our tendency to cast ourselves in the role of the nature-ruiner. had we curtailed cellphone use out of fear that we were hurting these bees, it would have been pointless, only serving to screw up our economic progress, with no benefit.

i am not saying the bees are not important. i am saying the bees will fix their own problems. new bees will come along to replace the old virus-ridden bees, with no action required on our part. the best course for us is to do nothing.

you need to think of a little differently. we need to not intervene in things we do not fully comprehend. nature doesnt often need our clumsy efforts to self correct, we only screw things up. you have mentioned before that natural systems seek balance, equilibrium. that is true, and it happens without our help.

for evolution and progress to happen, some things die and extinction happens. the dead do not leave behind a vacuum. they are replaced, the void filled. we are not just left with a beeless, plantless, barren rock that doesn't sustain life. life moves along happily without us, we do not need to worry.

the beauty of nature is that we do not have to worry about it. we can ignore it and it doesnt mind.

and red, welcome back. i hope your family is well.

 

i know new bees will not evolve overnight. but there are already bees that resist the virus. and they will fill the void left behind by the bees that die. then all the bees have superior virus resistance.

by letting the inferior bees die, the whole of the world population of bees is stronger.

sure, we should study the bee virus and be aware of what is happening. but we should be wary of intervening in any way.

it is sort of like how we have overprescribed antibiotics to humans instead of allowing our natural immune systems to operate. it has been sort of counterproductive in the long run, because we are all weaklings and we are breeding superviruses.

i used to have a pet bee, his name was buzzy. although he shoulda been called stingy.

 

We can be a part of it though. Is that of no consequence to you?

There is no "intervention". There is only us & we're constantly changing the environment whether we are trying to or not.

As red has pointed out, it's our problem too.

But we already have done something. It turned out that our actions weren't actually hurting the bees, but that doesn't change the fact that our actions could affect them.

This is where I agree with you. I believe that if we know we can help the environment in some way, we should take that action. But the fact is that science & our understanding of the environment just aren't advanced enough yet for us to make informed decisions on these matters.

 

no. species are supposed to go extinct. saving them is not a noble goal. extinct species make more room for the ones that have adapted and are superior. instead of trying to prevent species from going extinct, we should celebrate. if we die out, i am sure something better will replace us. robots i would guess. and since we will be dead, we won't care much.

what did we do besides fret that it might be our phones hurting the bees? the bees will die off for a while and then come back. waves of disease come and go all the time, regulating populations of various animals.

i dont even know what "help" means in this context. is preventing bees from dying off from a virus "helping"? it certainly isnt helping the virus, which is just as much a part of nature as the bees.

correct. our attempts to help are likely to leave us worse off than we were before. nature corrects itself better than we do.

 

We very much care while we are on our path to extinction. I don't know how you do not have it, but most people want to see our species continue to thrive - regardless of whether we as an individual are alive to see it.

I'd say that saving a species from extinction that we are causing is a noble goal.

Does that mean we should never have tried to cure any human diseases? We should accept AIDS & not try to find a cure because it is nature's way of thinning the population?

I am unable to see any positive benefits we get from this particular disease, where as there are obvious benefits to having bees.

So far, this has proven to be the case. That doesn't mean there aren't times when we can make a positive impact.