Humans are fine without bees

If you ingest a lot of mainstream media, you are forgiven for wondering at this point “What about bees?” For example Wired ran an article discussing the plight of America’s honeybees: the collapsed colonies and dying hives, threatening pollination services to crops and the future of a much-beloved insect (Keim, 2014). However, Wired also warned that many wild pollinators are also threatened including thousands of species including bees and butterflies and moths. An ecologist warns that nearly 90% of the world’s flowering species require insects or other animals for pollination (Keim, 2014). After all there is a common quote (Often misattributed to Einstein of all people!) “If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live.” This greatly overstates the value of pollinators for human food production. The total loss in agricultural production for a loss of all animal pollinators is only 3–8% (Aizen et al., 2009). Though this percentage is growing, not all animal pollinators are bees. Therefore, the complete loss of bees, although extremely unfortunate, would not be an agricultural disaster of the magnitude focused on in this book.