State Sen. Richard Codey has introduced a bill that would make New Jersey’s penalties for talking on a cell phone while driving the strictest in the nation, but here’s my question: If this thing passes, who’s gonna arrest cops for talking on their cell phones while they drive?

I’m not joking about this, but first some background on the bill. Under Codey’s proposed legislation, third-time losers who are caught talking on cell phones or texting while driving would get their drivers’ licenses suspended for 60 days. The fines would also increase to $100 for the first offense, $250 for the second and $500 for the third.

Four-time offenders would have to wear a Boston Red Sox jersey, pink knee-length rayon shorts, Birkenstocks and wear a plywood sandwich board that says DOOFUS on both sides for six hours while standing on the sidewalk in front of the police station.

Just kidding about that last part. Four-time offenders would actually have to wear a Carmen Miranda hat with lots of plastic fruit, and the sandwich board would read RETROMINGENT BUFFOON (I’ve wanted to use that phrase in a column since William F. Buckley called someone that in one of his newspaper pieces, and I’ve finally gotten the chance).

I’m all in favor of Codey’s proposed legislation, but on the day I read about it in the newspaper last week, I was driving around Milltown (the speed trap capital of New Jersey) and had an interesting experience.

Milltown, as many drivers have discovered to their chagrin, apparently raises most of its municipal revenue from ticketing drivers for traffic violations.

It’s a small town, and the speed limit is 25 mph on most of the streets. To enforce it, cops hide everywhere and issue so many tickets it’s a wonder they don’t all suffer carpal tunnel syndrome.

My favorite are the cops who park right at the border of Milltown and East Brunswick, where the speed limit changes from 25 mph to 40 mph as soon as you cross the bridge marking the border. They bust hundreds of scofflaws who can actually see the 40 mph speed limit sign through their windshields but haven’t yet crossed the municipal border where the higher limit applies.

In Milltown, about once a month, they also put up checkpoints on the main road in front of the police station to catch people whose inspections have expired. They use the VFW parking lot to hold all the offenders, and you can just hear the mayor shouting “Booyah!” as the revenue enhancers in blue pull over another batch of reprobates.

At any rate, on the day the story about Codey’s bill came out, I was driving by the police station and two cops were driving out of the station lot in separate cars. Both of them were talking on their cell phones while driving.

Keep in mind that most police also monitor dispatch radios while driving and lots of them have on-board computers as well. So listening to the police radio, watching the computer and talking on a cell phone is a triple distraction — which would qualify these law enforcement officers as three-time offenders facing 60-day license suspensions — if we go by the spirit of the proposed law.

But who is going to ticket them? Another cop? In Milltown, the other cops are too busy writing traffic tickets to (mostly) out-of-town drivers.

I love and respect the contribution cops make to my safety, and I know some of Milltown’s finest personally, but come on, fair is fair. But if cops don’t abide by the cell phone laws that already exist, and probably won’t abide by the stricter law if it passes, does that mean it’s up to us regular people to enforce the thing? Should we make a citizen’s arrest if we see a police officer talking on a cell phone while driving? Is that even legal?

I wish some of my expert readers would weigh in and let me know before something unpleasant happens and I, or someone who gets a bright idea from reading this, winds up in handcuffs. In the meantime, I’ll be driving extra carefully in Milltown, since I think some of the local John Laws around here might recognize my pickup (the black Super Ram with chrome stacks and pinstriped flames).

And speaking of cell phones, file this under One More Thing to Worry About.

I know we’re all worried about the plight of bees, and the fact that they seem to be dying off in record numbers. And most of us have read what scientists have said will happen if this “colony collapse disorder” continues unabated. Since bees pollinate 90 percent of commercial crops worldwide, we’ll starve, that’s what will happen.

There are several reasons for this bee situation. Parasitic mites (a great name for a rock band) kill a lot of them, as do agricultural pesticides and climate change.

But now, according to some scientists in India and reported recently by CNN, it looks like cell phones are killing lots of them, too. Researchers in India (not the folks who are taking outsourced customer service calls for U.S. companies) fitted cell phones to beehives and turned them on for 15 minutes twice a day. According to the story, “After three months, they found the bees stopped producing honey, egg production by the queen bee halved, and the size of the hive dramatically reduced.”

A layman might deduce that the queen’s egg production was curtailed because she was talking on her cell phone so much, but some scientists think it’s more possible that bees are affected by cell phone radiation.

Nothing has been proved, and further study will no doubt produce lots of work for scientific bee researchers (not all of them in India), and hand-pollinating crops might provide some jobs here to all the people who became unemployed after the census was over (I don’t think that can be outsourced to India).

In the meantime, I think the course for the environmentally conscious among us is clear: Smash your cell phone! Save a bee!

I just hope the Milltown cops are listening. The lives of bees throughout Middlesex County are dependent on the outcome.

Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at gbean@gmnews.com.