SRC-537

Environmental Assessment for the Satellite Power System (SPS): Studies of Honey Bees Exposed to 2.45 GHz Continuous-Wave Electromagnetic Energy; DOE/ER-0095; December 1980

Commissioned by U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Research, Solar Power Satellite Projects Division; Under Contract No. 31-109-38-5448. Who paid for a study is recorded because it bears on how its conclusions should be read, not because it makes them wrong.

Published claims resting on this source

• CLM-1147 The 1980 programme's experiments on bees, at strengths from the edge of a rectenna to about twice its centre, found nothing: eggs hatched, adults found their way home, a colony raised brood for a month under the edge-of-rectenna level, and foragers flew straight into fields nearly twice as strong as the beam centre to get at sugar water.
• CLM-1148 Bee eggs, grubs and pupae zapped for half an hour at up to twice the beam-centre strength grew into normal adults at the same rate as unexposed ones; the one pattern in the egg numbers, treated slightly below sham at every level including zero, the authors trace to which shelf the combs sat on afterwards.
• CLM-1149 One hive lived for four weeks, a full brood cycle, under the beam strength expected at the edge of a receiving station, and behaved like the identical hive next door with the beam off.
• CLM-1150 Six thousand bees took part, 2,500 of them dosed, and were let go a hundred metres from home; the dosed ones found their hive as often as the undosed. Another set was watched for three weeks afterwards in glass hives and lived as long.
• CLM-1151 Bees kept a full day at up to twice the beam-centre strength (fifty times the beam-edge level), alone or huddled, ate and lived afterwards like bees that had not been; in six-hour runs, single thermometer readings inside them and their clusters differed from the sham box's by up to about 7 degrees, in no consistent direction.
• CLM-1152 Bees flew four hundred metres to a sugar dish sitting in a microwave field nearly twice the beam-centre strength, went in without hesitating, and made twenty to thirty round trips in three hours, with no significant difference from bees whose dish had no field.
• CLM-1153 The people who ran the bee tests said so themselves: one species, in boxes whose field strength wandered by a third across the tray, with the questions of whether a warm rectenna would draw insects in winter, and birds after them, still open.

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