Science mysteries… explained!!! In today’s JSP science blog entry, we’re going to investigate a new but serious mystery… Where have all the bees gone? Did you know that bees have been disappearing in large numbers in North America and Europe? The US has been hit especially hard by the mysterious disappearance of the bees. Beekeepers all over the country are finding bees missing or dead in their hives. And nobody knows what going on… or maybe they do! This just in! Scientists now have a theory that cell phones are the culprits. Honestly! It’s not often that you would use the words “bees” and “cell phones” in the same sentence, but scientists in England have been “bzzzzy” doing exactly that! They believe that the radiation (energy) given off by cell phones is interfering with the bees radar, a built in homing device that helps them find their way back to the hive. Without their radar, bees are totally lost! 

Does this sound pretty far fetched to you? Well, it turns out that other animals use similar systems to find their way around. For example, whales use sonar. Sonar is a means of finding one’s location or that of other objects by bouncing sound waves off of them. When whales sing their beautiful songs, they are often determining what is around them as the sound waves bounce off objects and come back to them. But like the bees, their unique senses can be muddled up. In this case, the culprits are sonar waves sent out by submarines. Submarines also need to know where they are in the dark murky ocean waters, but unfortunately, their signals confuse the whales and they get lost. Will wildlife and technology even be friends?  Some scientists worry that in our technological world there will soon be no room for wildlife. Do you agree? Hmmm, sounds like a good question for a science project!