Honeybees Are Overrated

[aggienaut]

   Don't get me wrong, you know I like bees, but I'm also a huge fan of being realistic about things. I just finished about a month of working the beekeeper's association booth at the local fair, and have some venting to do about the things people say. I address most of the dumb questions in this other post, but I'd like to address two issues more in depth.


I. "Albert Einstein said if the bees disappeared all humans would be gone within four years"

   Is a quote I've seen bandied around a number of times and a pretty fair number of people coming through the booth liked to recite it for me. However, consider:

(A) Honeybees aren't native to the Americas
(B) Humans lived in the Americas just fine prior to the introduction of what they called "white man's flies" by European colonists

   So how would a genius like Einstein get this wrong? Well the answer is quite simple really: he didn't. He didn't say it.

   The quote doesn't appear anywhere until 1994 (39 years after his death), where its used in a pamphlet protesting tariffs alleged to harm French beekeepers.


II. Honeybee Pollination is Responsible for 1 Out of Every 3 Bites You Eat

Is often noted anywhere people are trying to talk up bees and beekeeping, including on some of our club stuff at the fair I think. My original objection was just that putting it that way makes it sound like some odd sort of food russian roulette, where no matter what you're eating, every third bite was touched by a bee.

   So I was complaining about it in this context, and then it was brought to my attention that this is not true either.
   The one third number was actually a wild guess someone prominently made in 1976, but people have been running with it ever since. To quote my source (Keith Delaplane, prominent professor of entomology in the beekeeping community) "The authors of the FAO analysis concluded that the proportion of global food production attributable to animal pollination ranges from 5% in industrialized nations to 8% in the developing world." ... "About 75% of the world’s crops benefit to some degree from animal pollination; only 10% of that 75% depend fully on animal pollination."

As whatisbiscuits points out "Twelve crops currently provide 90% of the calories that support human beings on earth - banana, barley, cassava, coconut, corn, millet, potato, rye, rice, sorghum, sweet potato and wheat - but none of these top twelve need bee pollination. Therefore human life doesn't depend on bee pollination, but the quality and variety of our diet would be diminished without it."

   So yea, one out of twenty bites you eat is dependent on honeybee pollination ... if you bite things at random.


III. Honeybees are just so special!

   Or some such. Don't get me wrong they ARE important because while life won't stop without them, nothing else extant is as effective at mass pollination of fields. The commercial farming of those products that are dependant would become significantly more costly. BUT in terms of inherent value other than that, they're not more special to me than say bumblebees or wasps or butterflies or .. possums. But people come into the bee booth acting like honeybees deserve some special sacred appreciation just because.. they're useful to us?
   Someone was going on the other day about all the harmful things humans have done to the honeybee's environment, to which I pointed out "you know what the most environmentally destructive thing we've probably done involving honeybees is? Introduce them to America ... which pushes all the native pollinators out of their niche and messes up the ecosystem."


   In conclusion, it's not that I've become actually anti honey bee or anything, I still think they're fascinating, I just would prefer people keep everything in perspective. (and not be blindly repeating phrases which are simply not true)


(special thanks to klig and whatisbiscuits for the mythbusting help (: )


***Edit: Sorry to all of you who saw this twice. I warned you. (: