What happens if bees dont pollinate

I guess you could really supplement that with vitamins, but again, definitely not all of the vitamins can be as easily accessible to the body as they are when you're actually eating them. Narrator: And we could be closer to a bee-less future than you might expect. Narrator: Scientists haven't pinned down an exact reason for this sudden decline in the bee population. However, likely reasons are global warming, overuse of pesticides, and parasitic varroa mites, which spread viruses to bee colonies.

Right now, countries around the world are working to monitor bee colonies and even create new pollination methods using robots. It all would most likely be more costly. Narrator: So, what can the average person do to be more bee-friendly?

Well, if you have a garden, plant a range of flowers so wandering bees can have access to nectar throughout the year. Providing access to water would also be very helpful for the bees, and reducing pesticide input if at all possible.

Narrator: While steps are already being taken to save the world's bee population, there's still a lot to be done to protect Earth's most buzzy pollinators.

World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. A photo has been circulating for a while that suggests our grocery stores will look like this in a world without bees.

Is that true? Will our food choices be radically limited, come the future Beepocalypse? We already know what raising fruit without honey bees looks like. Armed with pollen-loaded paintbrushes and cigarette filters, people swarm around pear and apple trees in spring. The reason why they hand pollinate is not what you think, though. Honey bees are still present in these areas of hand pollination, and many fruit growers also keep bees for honey.

Hand pollination in China has as much to do with economics and fruit biology as it does with bees. In the early s, farmers of marginal lands in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region--an area spanning parts of Nepal, China, Pakistan, and India--realized that apples could be a major cash crop. Their land was mountainous and hard to farm, so tree fruits were ideally suited to the region. A major shift occurred from subsistence farming to fruit crops.

The payoffs were large -- in some areas, farmers quadrupled their income. Now they had cash on hand to send kids to school and build roads. Quality of life improved. With that early success, farmers found that certain varieties of apples and pears sold better than others. As new orchards went in, more and more of the same cultivars of apples were planted.

And that is when things started to go wrong. A fruit is a plant ovary with embryos seeds inside. It's how plants reproduce. Bees and other pollinators serve as plant sexual surrogates by spreading pollen plant sperm! A flower has to be pollinated to "set fruit" or begin to create the juicy ovaries that will become apples. Some fruits are self-pollinating, and can fertilize themselves without any bees involved.

The Navel Oranges seen in the photo at the top are a good example of a fruit that can self-pollinate. Most fruit trees -- pears and apples in particular -- are self-sterile for their own pollen. If you plant all Royal Delicious apples, for example, you won't get fruit, with or without bees. Just as we don't often marry our cousins, apple and pear trees require cross-pollination with "pollinizer varieties" that are not closely related to produce a full crop of fruit.

Clearing marginal lands for agriculture destroyed nesting and food resources native pollinator species needed. The problem with insects as commercial pollinators is that they can't just appear for 2 weeks, pollinate your plants, and disappear. Beekeeping probably predates the dawn of agriculture, which occurred about 12, years ago, and likely made farming possible. How important are bees to farming today? A spread of that size indicates a lack of authoritative scholarship on the subject.

My review of the literature suggests the same. The most thorough and informative study came back in , when an international team of agricultural scholars reviewed the importance of animal pollinators, including bees, to farming.

Their results could encourage both the alarmists and the minimizers in the world of bee observation. The group found that 87 crops worldwide employ animal pollinators, compared to only 28 that can survive without such assistance.

Since honeybees are by consensus the most important animal pollinators, those are scary numbers. Look at the data differently, though, and it's clear why the misattributed Einstein quote is a bit of an exaggeration. Approximately 60 percent of the total volume of food grown worldwide does not require animal pollination. Many staple foods, such as wheat, rice, and corn, are among those 28 crops that require no help from bees.

They either self-pollinate or get help from the wind. Those foods make up a tremendous proportion of human calorie intake worldwide. Even among the 87 crops that use animal pollinators, there are varying degrees of how much the plants need them.

Production of the remaining crops would likely continue without bees with only slightly lower yields. So if honeybees did disappear for good, humans would probably not go extinct at least not solely for that reason. But our diets would still suffer tremendously. The variety of foods available would diminish, and the cost of certain products would surge.