HONEYBEES AND HUMANITY
There's a meme that's been going around for a decade or more that I'd like to see end. There are many variations but they typically involve two contrasting pictures: one is a barren wasteland and the other some kind of lush Eden overflowing with life. The text accompanying the former image will read something like “If honeybees go extinct” and the latter will read, “If humans go extinct”. While I appreciate the sentiment and any desire to protect species, this is not just false but it also contains a certain amount of especially vulgar wickedness as well.
Honeybees are just one specific variety of bee we selected to do our bidding. They're mostly used in industrial agriculture, are not natural to most settings they've been introduced to, are transported around by us on trucks, and are fed an artificial, cheap, poor-quality diet of sugar water. While I love honeybees, their honey, and photographing them, there's nothing particularly special about them and their role in the food system and pollination generally is quite limited.
That we know of, there are tons of wasps, flies, mosquitoes, moths, butterflies, beetles, lizards, birds, bats, rodents, and primates that are out there pollinating plants. And we do it by hand too. The estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 species of pollinators – and they pollinate about 250,000 or so species of plants. So, a world without honeybees would be virtually indistinguishable as another organism, or several species, would happily move in on the newly abundant resources.
While thousands of plants are used for food, hundreds of those are grown widely, but there are just a few that produce most of the world’s food. Those are: bananas and plantains, cassava, coconut, sorghum, potatoes and sweet potatoes, corn, oats, barley, millet, rye, rice, quinoa, and wheat. All of these plants are wind-pollinated, self-pollinated, propagate asexually, or develop without the need for fertilization. In addition, there are a great number of other non-staple food plants that require no insect pollinators including, of course, the dozen or so nutritious and delicious sea vegetables we don't tend to put in these lists. Aside from food, most conifers and somewhere around 48,000 of the world’s flowering plants receive no pollination help from insects but rely entirely on the wind moving about the tremendous volumes of very fine pollen grains they produce with their male organs, and then their own female organs with which to catch this particulate once aloft. It's mostly berries, melons, and tree fruits that really need help from insect pollinators, though few need honeybees specifically to survive.
But then there's the human side of the meme's equation. We've bred countless organisms that rely upon us for their wide distribution and even their existence – which is almost everything you see when you look around (from chrysanthemums to Chihuahuas.) So our extinction would likely be theirs too, or at the very least their global decimation.
And we shouldn't forget about the countless species for which we and our habitats just make life so much easier. From bats and crows to mice and ants, many species would have much harder lives and die back at virtually genocidal levels if our constant supplies of easy food, shelter, and warmth disappeared. And there is really no better example of this than with bees. There are far more bees of all kinds in the city than in rural settings because of the variety and volume of food, water, and safe habitat we humans supply them with. So without cities there would simply be far fewer bees.
Of course it's fine to be a little off, or even inadvertently wrong, in your messaging but I think there needs to be some appreciation for what this, and the many campaigns like it, does to our psychology and to that of our children. This kind of stuff can be found floating all over the internet and giving people not just bad science to digest but also a kind of righteously apocalyptic frame of mind: a sense that the end of our species is the very best thing that could possibly happen. So it's not nearly as innocuous as it may appear at first. In the most generous terms I can muster, I think the meme, the idea behind it, and it's reasonable reading are alone and together stupid. This is psychopathic thinking. In fact, this is the pure nihilism of mass murders, and we know so because they tell us. One of the boys that shot up Columbine High School in 1999 wrote in his suicide note: "The human race isn't worth fighting for, only worth killing. Give the Earth back to the animals. They deserve it infinitely more than we do." This statement could fit as a reasonable caption for the meme. This statement and it's attendant resentment seems a perfectly logical conclusion for anyone consuming the honeybee/humanity meme and who has any sympathy at all for other creatures. And surely it takes little more than experiencing some of life's requisite catastrophe and misery to cause a kind of metanoia of doom that may orient a person toward the (il)logic and action of the nihilistic sort we see commonly splashed across the news.
Instead of such a pathetic message we should be showing people that the world is amazing – full of mysteries not understood, teeming with connection and congruence not yet mapped, and effects whose causes we can't yet see – and that they, like all other organisms, are an astonishingly improbable and ephemeral instrument within the enigmatic symphony of being.
