If bees die what will happen

If bees went extinct, it would be a domino effect in terms of ecosystem destruction. According to Britannica, plants wouldn't be able to repopulate without humans hand-pollinating them. The animals who eat those plants would then start to starve and die off, then their predators' numbers would start to dwindle, and so on. Although cereal grains are wind-pollinated, most produce requires insect pollination , from bees in particular.

The diversity of fresh produce and agriculture as a whole would also rapidly decline — almonds, apples, blueberries, broccoli, cherries, chocolate, coffee, cranberries, and melons are only a few plants we eat that need bee pollination. Human nutrition and food security would basically collapse without them. Those who choose to eat animals would suffer, too, because livestock seeds would be much harder to produce in large quantities.

Therefore, there would be no way for human populations to stay afloat. And that figure is growing by over , species every year. Yet hard data on threatened insect species is lacking, with only 8, records actually assessed by the IUCN. Recently, the spread of the Asian Hornet in Europe has caused great concern. This species preys on honey bees, and a single hornet is capable of killing an entire hive. There is some evidence that wild bees in North America have declined in the face of fungal and bacterial diseases.

Read more: Embattled bees face yet another potential threat — virus-carrying hoverflies. Of course, in the past bees have coexisted with these pathogens. Pollution — particularly from exposure to pesticides — is a key cause of pollinator decline. There are three types of chemical pesticide widely used in the UK: insecticides targeting insect pests, fungicides targeting fungal pathogens of crops and herbicides targeting weeds. But they may not be the greatest problem pollinators experience.

And the thing is, bees are some of the best pollinators out there. In fact, they've co-evolved with flowering plants over millions of years to become pollinating machines. Without bees and other pollinators, supermarket shelves would hold about half the fruits and vegetables they have now, transforming the produce section from this We wouldn't have luxuries like almonds, apples, or avocados. We use alfalfa to feed dairy cattle, and dairy cattle, of course, produces the milk, and the milk is used to produce many dairy products that we eat.

When I talk to the kids, all the kids are very disappointed to hear that we might lose ice cream. Narrator: The extinction of bees could have a disastrous domino effect, killing off animals that eat those plants, and so on up the food chain.

Luckily, humanity wouldn't face a global famine like you might expect. Narrator: So if the bee apocalypse does hit, we could still meet the daily calorie needs of our global population. Our diets, however, would suffer in major ways, as foods that provide key nutrients for our bodies would become scarce and extremely expensive. We would probably be very sickly. It's almost impossible to overstate the importance of pollinators in our ecosystem.

In case you missed this day in high school biology, when a male flower loves a female flower, it invites a pollinator to round out its threesome. The bee transfers pollen from the male flower to the lady bits of female flowers.

A few days later, a baby watermelon or apple emerges. While bees are not the only pollinators we have bats, birds, butterflies, and some flies can do this work, too , they're by far the best creatures for the job.

In part, this is because they need pollen to feed their larvae, so they're biologically driven to gather the stuff. Other pollinators visit flowers only to suck nectar, and any pollen that sticks to them in the process is a happy accident. Bees also provide food for some bird species, so if a cataclysmic event sent all our bees into rapture, the aftershocks would ripple up the food chain.

Unfortunately, that rapture may be coming. While incidences of colony collapse disorder—or entire hives being wiped out overnight—have slowed in the past few years, "just because we don't see as high occurrence of CCD does not mean that honey bees are doing great," says Elina L.

The current scourges of honeybees include a parasitic mite called the varrao mite and the new presidential administration. In , the Obama administration implemented a Pollinator Protection Research Plan, which tasked all government agencies with reviewing ways to protect birds, bats, butterflies, and bees.

It used this intel to implement the Pollinator Protection Plan in