On Einstein, Bees, and Survival of the Human Race – Bees, Beekeeping & Protecting Pollinators | Honey Bee Program

Source: On Einstein, Bees, and Survival of the Human Race – Bees, Beekeeping & Protecting Pollinators | Honey Bee Program

Keith S. Delaplane, Professor, Dept. Entomology,
University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602 USA

This sounds presumptuous, doesn’t it? I mean, lumping bees alongside weighty stuff like survival of the human race. But the fact is, associations like this do get bantered about, especially in times like ours when the welfare of pollinators is a hot topic. Politicians, taxpayers, and agriculturalists are asking, So, just how important are bees? For the most part, beekeepers have been quick to take a high view on this question. And no doubt, one of the rewarding things about working with honey bees is the fact that they are important. Important at the human scale – not just important to me or my fellow beekeepers, but important to the quality of life enjoyed by beneficiaries of developed economies the world over. This importance does not hang on honey production, but pollination – nothing less than our food supply. So it is with pardonable pride that beekeepers have been known to endorse quotes like the one attributed to Albert Einstein: “If the bee disappears from the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years left to live.”

Now I must quickly say that there is no good evidence that Albert Einstein actually said this. In fact he most assuredly did not. All you have to do is google “Einstein bees,” and you’ll get the whole story: how this quote surfaced for the first time in the early 1990s, long after Einstein’s death, and in contexts far removed from the possibility of verification. Moreover, one must note the fact that, genius though he was, Albert was a physicist, not an entomologist, and everyone knows that it’s entomologists who are the real authorities on this matter.

But the question implied in this pseudo-quote still stands: is it true that human life depends on bee pollination? Or, more precisely, to what extent does the quality of human life depend on bee pollination? These are legitimate questions, and it’s in everyone’s best interest to promulgate answers based on good biology and economics, not hyperbole, anecdote, or – as the Einstein pseudo-quote warns us – fiction….