The Walden Effect: Farming, simple living, permaculture, and invention.

The GWEN bee connection?

bee chartThere's no shortage of speculation on the internet about colony collapse disorder, which is the name given to the recent decrease in honey bee populations.

I'll share with you two things I've discovered that may or may not be connected --- you be the judge.

In the May, 1988 Journal of Comparative Physiology, Sensory, Neural, and Behavioral Physiology a group of German scientist confirmed that magnetic field bursts at a frequency of 250 Hz induced unequivocal "jumps" of misdirection in honey bee navigation of up to 10 degrees.

The Ground Wave Emergency Network (GWEN) is an array of 300 transceivers distributed across the continental United States with a spacing of about 250 miles. GWEN was designed to transmit critical warning and response messages that would be immune to the effects of electromagnetic pulses, which would be generated by a high altitude nuclear explosion. The system was supposedly replaced by the Milstar satellite system, but it seems to me a satellite might be vulnerable and they might want to keep GWEN on the back burner. The Wikipedia entry on GWEN proves the system has a wide range of frequencies and might be capable of producing signals within the 250 Hz range.

Every year we add some kind of new gadgetry to make cell phones work better and internet's to run faster, all the while polluting the air with electromagnetic frequencies. It's not such a bad thing to live in a hilly area that seems to be mostly blocked from cell phone signals and TV stations. Maybe our bees will avoid this problem thanks to our unique geography.



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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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