Name the most important domesticated animal in the world. No, it's not the pig, the cow or the chicken. And no, it's not the dog or the cat.

It is the humble honeybee.

Why? Not honey, though it's very good and is the only food that never spoils. The reason is pollination.

If you enjoy apples, almonds, peaches, cantaloupes, blueberries, avocados, cherries, cranberries, watermelons, sunflower seeds and any of the hundreds of other food crops that rely exclusively on bees to pollinate their flowers, your diet may soon be much poorer.

If the flowers are not pollinated, the fruit will never form. No bees, no pollination. No pollination, no watermelons and I, for one, don't want to live in a world where summer comes without watermelon.

Without bees, one-third of the food humans consume would simply cease to exist.

Why are we even talking about this? The bees are disappearing and scientists are scrambling to find out why.

"Colony collapse disorder" began hitting hives on the East Coast late last fall. Mysterious bee deaths have since spread across the country and around the world. Beekeepers would find nothing but empty hives, the bees missing and presumed dead. All the honey was left behind, indicating the bees planned to return, because when they are relocating, they take their food with them.

Honeybee colonies have been under assault from tiny mites for many years now, but the mite is not to blame this time. Scientists have focused on several possibilities, but are still too early in their "CSI-Bee Colony" to even know if it is a pathogen or a pesticide that's the problem.

Whatever is happening, bees are becoming disoriented while out foraging and are unable to find their way back to the hives. The individual bees then either die of starvation or exposure and, with no worker bees to feed the drones and the queen, the colony collapses.

One study recently completed by German researchers indicates a more insidious problem. They postulate that the electromagnetic radiation put off by the millions of cell phone towers and other wireless communication networks may be putting out enough juice to scramble the bees' innate navigation systems, preventing them from finding their way back to their hives.

If this is the case, I will take a fresh cantaloupe over my cell phone any day. But if this theory does pan out, expect a massive and vicious response from the telecommunications industry. And no, it's not feasible to fit each of the billions of bees in the U.S. with little metal helmets to stave off the "buzz" of EM radiation we've added to the landscape.

Even if colony collapse disorder is eventually tracked back to a pathogen or a pesticide, the theory about the EM radiation really got me thinking about this huge experiment we are currently conducting on the planet and on ourselves.

Between the ubiquitous wireless phone networks and the burgeoning wireless internet networks - both the local ones people maintain in homes and businesses, and the more widespread ones that cover entire cities or regions - we have greatly increased the amount of EM radiation in our daily lives.

You can't see it and you can't feel it, but at some point, you just have to wonder if we all aren't slowly scrambling our DNA as we microwave in our own juices.

There is already a strong link between heavy cell phone use and brain cancer and there is a growing body of evidence that cell phone radiation kills brain cells. Are we just setting the next generation up to be senile before they hit 50?

The levels of radiation that we are surrounded with on a daily basis are a billion times higher than the level our DNA evolved with since the beginning of life on Earth. Is that a problem? Maybe. Will we find out before it's too late? I hope so.

(Jonathan Maziarz is the editor of the Tribune & Georgian and a regular Friday columnist. He has not seen a single bee in his yard so far this spring.)