Can humans survive without bees?

When it comes to bees, most people think of honey, but when you see bees in your life, some people feel annoyed with them because they will sting you and make you feel stinging, or even worse, if you are unfortunately allergic, there will be fatal consequences. But the truth is that bees are inextricably linked to the survival of human beings besides producing honey. If one day all the bees in the world die, then human beings will not be able to survive either, why is that?

First, we know that over 80% of the world's crops are flowering plants, and to reproduce, these crops must be pollinated by pollinating organisms. In rare cases, wind, water, or animals like birds inadvertently help pollinate crops, but in most cases, plant pollination is done by insects: bees, beetles, butterflies, and dragonflies.

Bees are a type of pollinating insect and play a vital role in pollination. They are responsible for pollinating 76% of the world's food crops and 84% of the world's plants. "Without pollinating bees, most of the plants on this planet would disappear," said Horowitz, a professor in the Department of Entomology, Ecology, and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona.

In such a bee-free world, we would lose more than just a touch of green. In terms of calorie count or volume, 50-90% of human food comes directly from flowering plants. These crops include our staple foods, such as rice and wheat, as well as fruits and vegetables. In addition to this, flowering plants provide us with food indirectly - they serve as food for animals, and we in turn ingest animal meat products - from beef to chicken and the vast majority of freshwater fish.

Before humans realized the important relationship between bees and humans, many of them were already dying out, facing unprecedented disasters due to climate change, environmental pollution, and other issues. For example, the misuse of chemicals in agriculture is killing bees or damaging their nervous systems; more seriously, global warming is breaking the delicate synchronization between bee hatching and spring plant flowering. As long as this synchronization is off by a few weeks, many flowering plants will have difficulty getting adequate pollination, and plants that bloom too early or too late will not produce fruit while pollinating bees will be starved because they miss the flowering season.

A sharp decline in bee populations could lead to a break in the biological chain. According to biological experts, bees have a balancing effect on ecosystems, especially on populations in alpine regions. Without bees, the pollination of plants in alpine mountains would be affected and would be transformed from a mixed forest with many plant species to a pine and fir forest with monotonous plants.

If bees were to disappear completely, all plants that require bee pollination would also face extinction because they would not be able to reproduce, and the animals that feed on these extinct plants would be the next to die out. With the breakage of the food chain, humans will eventually die out because they can not find food. Of course, with the current level of scientific and technological development, many crops can even skip the pollination link, through genetic engineering or spraying agents to achieve flowering. But, the food bred in this way is delicious? Is it still the food we imagine? More importantly, is it safe?

The disappearance of a species, no matter how small, is not a simple event, but the loss of a species will have an impact on at least the species before and after it in the biological chain, and even on humans and nature as a whole. Sometimes these effects are not immediately apparent, but just because they are not apparent does not mean they do not exist. To protect bees is to protect humans themselves because a break in some key links in the food chain can often quickly lead to a break in the entire food chain or even the entire ecological chain.

Every species and every life on earth deserves respect and protection. To live in harmony with all kinds of creatures in nature, to set the right position for humans in nature, and to use human power to make the natural environment and ecology more harmonious and beautiful is the fundamental way to human survival.