"When the bees become extinct humans will shortly follow"

In My Humble Opinion
1

Apologies for the apparent naivety of this and the generalization.

A friend of mine expressed the view that if Bees become extinct then Humans won’t last more than a few months/weeks.

I think it’s paraphrased from Einstein.

I can sort of understand it - Bees play a vital part in plant life reproduction. No more bees no more plant reproduction. Plants die off. Humans die off (and most mamals)
Accepting that I am a sh*t threadmaker: I at least have raised something for my betters to talk about. What are your views on this?

2

Well not all plants will die for a lack of Bees. This question should probably be in GQ as there are scientific answers to the issues. (These are beyond me.)

I think, (only as this is in IMHO) that it will cause great grief for humans, but that as a race we would survive.

I will report this thread for a Mod to decide if it should be moved.

Jim

3

A search for “bees” in thread titles revealed the following:

Colony collapse disorder and bees dying

Bees and colony collapse again

We don’t have to worry about bees dying off, do we? ( Multi-page thread 1 2 )

After the bees leave, humans have 4 years to live?

Life without bee’s

Umm, bees are missing? Should we not be concerned?

bees disappeared

4

…not to mention this Staff Report (which references the Einstein quote):

Why are the bees disappearing?

5

You may be surprised to know that the honeybees that are having problems here are European imports. The Americas did O.K. prior to 1492 without them, and presumably can do so again.

6

Indeed. The main reason honeybees are the primary pollinators of many plant species here is simply because they’ve squeezed out the competition. Once they’re gone, there are plenty of other birds and insects which will fill their shoes, so to speak.

7

Our bees have not come back. I noticed their absence about 4 years ago. We are not dead yet. I have almost lost my fear of walking through a field of dandelions.though.

8

I can’t cite, but I thought I’d heard other insect species were ‘filling the gap’ as far as cross pollination was concerned. Wasps in this case.

I know that our tree out front was ALIVE with bees this spring, evidently a migrating swarm picked it for a resting spot, they were gone by morning.

9

I wonder if the bee tree on my farm is in the same danger as domestic hives? They’ve been there for years. I don’t bother them and they’ve never stung me.

StG

10

I read a news article the other day (sorry, don’t remember where) about a bee farmer in New England whose bees were just thriving. He and his neighbors were organic farmers IIRC, and they did not transport the bees about for pollination purposes. He was of the opinion that contributing factors to CCD are exposure to various chemicals sprayed on the crops these days, plus all the moving about being trucked hither and yon as the pollination needs arose, which caused stress on the insects.

Question: Is the colony collapse disorder hitting other countries, or just the US? Western hemisphere? World-wide?

11

I don’t care what they say,
I won’t stay in a world without [del]love[/del] bees.