Hmmm: Life Without Honey Bees

An interview with Rowan Jacobsen, author of Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the Coming Agricultural Crisis about would happen to human civilization if bees completely died off.

Bread and (thankfully) wine would make it but life would be very very different.

A few buzz phrases...

• A single hive of honeybees can cross-pollinate 25 million flowers in a single day. A good bit of the flowering world (and the animals that rely on the fruits made by this flowering world) have come to depend on them.
• Colony Collapse Disorder first showed up in the fall of 2006, though there were a few signs of it in 2005. Honeybee populations, which had been slowly declining for decades, suddenly fell off a cliff. 31 percent of America’s honeybees died that winter, and another 36 percent died last winter. No one knows what is causing CCD, though there are a few leading suspects.
• More than 100 crops, about a third of the calories we eat, require cross-pollination by honeybees. The grain staples such as corn, rice, and oats are wind-pollinated, but most of the stuff that adds color to our plates and vitamins and antioxidants to our diets—apples, pears, blueberries, cherries, raspberries, plums, melons, cucumbers, zucchini, almonds, macadamia nuts, and so on—would disappear.
• No mass starvation, because the grains that make up the bulk of our diet are not at risk. So we’d have corn, bread, oatmeal, etc. And certain fruits, such as grapes, are wind-pollinated or self-fertilizing.
• Then there’s human pollination, as they’re doing in China. (Take millions of peasants, hand them bundles of chicken feathers, and let them climb through the fruit trees, touching every flower with a bit of pollen from a bucket. What we’d have is extraordinarily high prices for most of the fruits and vegetables that provide our vitamins and antioxidants, if they could be found at all.
• And the beef and dairy industry is switching more and more away from natural forage to corn because it’s cheaper. So we’d still have a beef industry, though a freaky one.
• But honeybees aren’t on the edge of going extinct. They are, however, on the edge of not being able to provide all the pollination we’ve asked of them.

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