Common misconceptions: why Einstein isn’t an authority on bees

by Tom Breeze

#SaveTheBees Facebook Campaign

I recently stumbled upon this article on Wikipedia. Not exactly what I’d expect from an encyclopaedia, I mean how common does common have to be and how do you rank such criteria for starters… but from a purely subjective position I’ve got a big one that needed to be on the list: the idea that humanity is doomed without bees. A lot of this stems from this quote that has become seemingly ubiquitous these days:

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live. No more bees, no more pollination … no more men!”

Well there’s three things wrong with all of this: First – it’s not “The Bee”, there are    over 20,000 species of bees globally and even then a wide range of other animals provide pollination services to plants, including hoverflies, humming birds, bats, mites, ants and even squirrels. Secondly, Einstein never said this or anything of the sort – according to several investigative websites (most recently by The Quote Investigator), I highly doubt Einstein was an authority on the subject (although of course I’m not a science historian, so I may be wrong). But most significantly of all – it just plain isn’t true.

The idea that all plants need pollination and pollination can only be done by bees actually sounds extreme when you say it out loud. Yet it’s become one of the most commonly entrenched, seldom challenged misnomers in modern science journalism. In actuality, the staple crops of global diets: wheat, rice, barley, maize, oats, all reproduce via abiotic pollination that doesn’t involve any insects. It’s not just cereals though; several fruits including bananas, pineapples and grapes are also entirely pollinated by the wind or even just gravity. Finally good majority of vegetables, including potatoes, brassicas (cabbage, kale, broccoli etc.) only require insect pollination for their seeds rather than their edible parts and many (but not all) of those can easily be produced via hand pollination. (If you want a central source for all this I’d suggest Klein et al, 2007, particularly the appendixes).

But there’s more to it even than that – even in crops which do benefit from insect pollination, very few are actually so reliant upon pollination that they cannot produce edible materials without them. Rapeseed, tomatoes, broad beans and dozens of others will still produce good quantities of produce even without animal pollination. Of course a number of crops would produce so little edible produce, particularly for the cost that growers experience in growing them in the first place, that without pollination they would be commercially unviable – the most prominent examples being tree fruits like apples and pears but also blueberries, pumpkins and vanilla.

The exact scale of the impacts of global pollination service was largely quantified in three landmark papers from 2007-2009: Klein et al (2007) examined, to a very basic extent, just how dependant over 100 global crops were upon pollination; finding that while 75% of global crops benefit to some extent from pollination the actual volume of production from these crops is only around 35% of global food production. Azien et al (2009) estimated the impacts of pollination services on total global food production and what proportion of global food production would be lost without insect pollinators. The result: 3-8% of global food production. That’s a lot for sure but it’s not the end of the world – although it certainly doesn’t help food security to have that few species of crop as the source of human diets and a later paper by Eilers et al (2011) highlights what the perspective nutritional impacts would be. Finally in 2009, Gallai et al (2009), building on Klein et al (2007)’s earlier work, estimated the actual economic impact of pollination services losses on the global economy – the global worth: a staggering €153bn to the growers and the same again to the consumer in terms of the money we save because supply and demand aren’t massively out of sync.

So while the end is not nigh without bees; 35% of the food we eat comes from crops they and other animals pollinate; 3-8% of the total global food production would be lost (at least until agronomic advances catch up) without them and they are worth over £200bn to the global economy – and that figure is likely to be a lot higher these days (as an augmented version of Gallai et al’s analysis by Lautenbach et al (2012), which is also open access, nicely illustrates).

Speaking personally – I’m far beyond fed up of seeing this quote do the rounds on social media and the popular press every time a good bit of research on bees or pollination comes out. Despite the fact that much of the research I have cited is very well established, and in some cases open access so anyone and everyone can read it, it just won’t die. Partly this is down to the fact that journalists are not scientists and are expected to produce more articles than usual thanks to digital media so sometimes it’s to be expected that old misconceptions diehard. But a bigger part of this in my eyes is the scientific community’s unwillingness to well and truly dismantle it, despite having the evidence to do so. And I actually think that’s quite dangerous, after all many of the most exaggerated myths about climate change, used all the time to denounce climate science as a whole, did not come from the scientific community but media parroting of misconceptions – put another way, this isn’t a problem yet but it will become one soon unless we actually start taking the impetus to address it. So I hope at least some of you reading will confront this nonsense when you see it on your mass or social media of choice, either with this article or the Wikipedia link above. Not just because we like getting hits for the blog but because it’s a genuinely simple fact to correct and, bluntly, science needs to stand up for itself.