Is the panic over bee extinction justified? (6 photos)

Too often, people destroy things they never intended to touch. Simply because of carelessness and ignorance. This is exactly what is happening to wild bees: since the 1950s, their numbers have dropped by about half and are still falling! If this continues, in just a couple of generations, bees and bumblebees will become rare, if not completely extinct. But what will happen to the world that loses its main pollinators?





Then the cool beekeepers will definitely not be able to dress up in a spacesuit made of bees...

Most of the planet's ecosystems are facing a crisis. Some species of flowering plants will die out, and even more will move from their main roles to secondary ones. The biological diversity of all plant communities will noticeably decrease. Moreover, the most productive and diverse of them - meadows, steppes and savannas - will get the most. But the complete collapse of all ecosystems and the planet's descent into chaos of mass extinction will most likely be avoided.



Up to our ears in work.

Yes, bees play a huge role in pollinating plants, but there are only 20 thousand species of them. In addition to them, there are at least 330 thousand (!) other pollinators on the planet from all groups of land animals: from millipedes to birds, mammals and even amphibians!





The diamond-eyed tree frog from the Brazilian tropical forests will gladly pollinate your flowers!

In addition, even now bees and bumblebees are not the main pollinators in a number of regions. In the tropics, butterflies and birds successfully compete with striped workers, while in the northern taiga they have been overtaken by flies and mosquitoes. And south of the Sahara, bees have to retreat under the onslaught of even stranger competitors - beetles, wasps and... rodents.



In 2022, scientists found that common brown rats are actively involved in pollinating feijoa. Moreover, rodents do an even better job than insects and birds!



The South African flower Ceropegia is pollinated by flies that suck the hemolymph from insects. To deceive the insects, the flower has learned to smell like a wounded bee. Now the author is also interested in what a wounded bee smells like.

And as the cherry on the cake: not all bees are dying out. Since the 90s, the global population of domesticated honey bees has grown by 47%, to 101 million families! Today, honey bees are experiencing exactly the same problems as wild ones. They are exhausted by climate change, tormented by new, previously unknown, parasites and diseases, and colony collapse disorder leads to sharp outbreaks of mortality in seemingly prosperous regions. But thanks to the timely actions of beekeepers and assistance from governments, domestic insects feel better than ever before.



Some scientists are seriously concerned that there are too many honey bees and they are starting to drive wild bees out of existence.

After all of the above, it may seem that wild bees can safely be sent into retirement. There are people to replace them, so let paleontologists have fun with them. But it only seems that way. 70% of agricultural crops are pollinated almost exclusively by wild bees. If they disappear, food prices will rise, and famine will begin in some regions. The planet will be fine. But I'm not sure about human civilization.