Okay, I may have gone off at the deep end, for which I apologise. The OP may have been making a good faith observation on the basis on media coverage of this. H

Okay, I may have gone off at the deep end, for which I apologise. The OP may have been making a good faith observation on the basis on media coverage of this. However, I stand by the fact that "mobile phones are bad for you" is an extremely irritating meme and I'd like to see it die. As to a temporal correlation, no there isn't. Six years before CCD was observed (2000) there were about 100 million mobile phones in the USA. In 2006, 200 million. Granted that is a large rise, but if I was looking for a correlation, I'd look at 0 to 100 million, not 100 to 200 million. The reason the popular press includes mobile phone signals as a possible cause, is that a) it's a common meme that people lap up, and b) as you point out, scientists have shown that if you put strong radio signals near hives, bees don't return there. But to me, that doesn't credibly imply CCD is caused by mobile phones. To look at this another way, Facebook was launched to everyone in 2006. Maybe the bees get distracted by facebook and starve to death? To test this, I put a computer running facebook inside a beehive. The bees stopped going to that hive. QED, facebook caused CCD. That wouldn't be credible, even if I had run the experiment and got that result. Anyway, you are right, the OP probably did genuinely think this was the explanation, which sucks for science journalism and more generally civil and technological society everywhere.