Einstein was wrong: Demise of bees won't bring humanity to its knees

ACCORDING to folklore, Albert Einstein once warned that if bees died out, humans would follow four years later.

However, scientists have described the idea that humans rely on honeybees to survive as a "myth".

Honeybees pollinate many of the vegetables and fruit eaten by humans and that feed livestock.

Now researchers writing in Current Biology say it is not true that a decline in the pollinators may threaten the human food supply – creating a "pollination crisis".

The scientists from Argentina and Canada argue that most agricultural crop production does not depend on pollinators.

However, they do warn honeybees are crucial for some of our favourite foods like plums, raspberries, cherries, mangoes, Brazil nuts and cashew nuts.

They also discovered, by analysing data from the United Nations, that demand for this type of crop has more than tripled in the past half century.

Dr Marcelo Aizen, of Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Argentina, said: "We were particularly astonished when we found the fraction of agricultural production that depends on pollinators – which includes all of these luxury agriculture items – started growing at a faster pace since the fall of communism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe.

"It grew at a much higher rate than the larger fraction of agricultural production that does not depend on pollinators, including wheat and rice, which just follow human population growth."

He added: "Although the primary cause of the accelerating increase of pollinator- dependent crops seems to be economic and political – not biological – their rapid expansion has the potential to trigger future pollination problems for both these crops and native species in neighbouring areas."

Dr Aizen said the increase in demand for agricultural land to grow these crops could destroy habitat that supports bees, causing a further drop in yield.

This, he warned, could lead to a vicious circle of decline.

"Decreasing yield by these pollinator-dependent crops surely would imply rising market prices, which undoubtedly would constitute a further incentive for their cultivation.

"This situation would create a positive feedback circuit that could promote more habitat destruction and further deterioration of pollination services."

Alan Teale, president of the Scottish Beekeepers Association, said he agreed that the end of bees would not spell the end of humans.

"It's generally said that about 70 per cent of the human diet is dependent on pollination of some kind," he said. "That's not all done by bees. There are many species of pollinators.

"My view is that if honeybees disappeared then we would not have the crisis that some people say we would have. We would certainly have less variety and changes would have to be introduced that people might not like. Many of the high-quality things might disappear."

He added that the natural environment would also suffer because bees pollinate wild plants.

"They are very important to the quality of the environment, to the quality of human food and to the diversity generally in food and the wider world.

"The world would be a poorer place without them. There's no doubt about that."

He also called into question whether Einstein really said that humans would die out four years after bees. "I've never seen any evidence that he actually said that," he added.