The mini-paper-umbrella clad drinks are glistening gently in the last rays of sunshine by the pool, the children are giggling at a safe distance chasing each other barefoot on the lawn and we let ourselves be lulled into leisurely small talk with good company. Life is slowing down, life is good.
Bzzz, bzzzz! We get yanked out of our late afternoon reverie, we swat at the airborne intruder like ninjas in an ambush, we order the youngsters off the treacherous green, conversations end abruptly, relaxation is instantly over.
The enemy is tiny, it is the danger signaling black and yellow striped kind, it zeros in on our sweet refreshments like a drone, it perfidiously lands on a flower, which may, at any moment, be stepped on by an unaware little foot.
A shoe will do, a shirt, a towel or a poisonous spray, we hunt the bug, we squash the bug, we will defend our family, we will prevail.
Or not!
If the buzzing trespasser that so unbecomingly ruined our well-deserved rest happened to be of the genus Hylaeus, we might as well have shot an elephant or clubbed to death a baby seal. Because the pollinator more commonly known as the bumblebee, the gooey mess sticking to the sole of the shoe we so proficiently used as a weapon, has recently been labeled an endangered species.
Wild bees, as opposed to their domesticated cousin the honey bees, are among the most prolific pollinators on the planet. Their work is vital in the maintenance of flowering plants, crops, and our entire ecosystem. In fact, about a third of the food we eat depends on bee pollination one way or another. The United Nations have recently estimatedinsect pollination worldwide to have a value of about 150 billion dollar. Industrialized and technologically advanced farming could never catch up to the pollinating effort of food plants as diverse as carrots, apples, lemons, onions, melons, and even coconuts, performed by bumblebees.
If this wild, buzzing insect were to be extinct, a considerable amount of our worldwide food supply would vanish within a few years. Without bees, an important amount of bird species would go extinct due to lack of food within even fewer years. With indiscriminate use of pesticides, genetically modify crops, global warming as well as the destruction of habitat, flowering meadows and smoking out wild beehives, the bees will go extinct.
And when the bees go, so do we.