What Happens to Ecosystems When Bees Disappear?
Losing bees means more than just having fewer flowers in our gardens – it will result in a chain reaction felt through entire ecosystems and food chains, including our own. Responsible for a third of global food production, bees are essential for life as we know it. So, what would it mean for us – and the world around us – if they disappeared?
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Scientists have been sounding the alarm on pollinator loss for decades, highlighting their importance and the urgent need for us to reverse their decline. You may have noticed that your garden has gotten quieter, with fewer fluttering wings from butterflies or the hum from buzzing bees. Well, that is simply because there are fewer of them around.
Since 1987, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) has reported that pollinator numbers have decreased by almost 25%. As we continue to create a world suited for our needs, bees are losing vital habitats they rely on for food and nesting. Lush meadows are replaced with fields upon fields of single crops. Green spaces are traded for steel and concrete. Our wild, messy, species-rich gardens become neat, mown lawns. Slowly, but surely, bees are being squeezed out of the world they have been part of for millions of years. Understanding the impact of their decline is crucial to fully grasping how important bees are and what their loss means for the world around us.
Nature’s Tiny Farmers
Bees – specifically honeybees – are widely considered the most efficient and effective pollinators. These bumbling, fuzzy creatures grace our green spaces when the sun shines, minding their business and working hard to feed their hives. Beautifully described as “humble-bees” by Charles Darwin, these insects are an integral part of nature, a welcome sight to many flowers for pollination and reproduction. To many, bees are simply seen as honey makers, providing us with delicious, sugary goodness that we enjoy in all sorts of food and drink. What we fail to appreciate daily is just how much impact bees have on all of our food through the pollination of crops. Bees are indeed a fundamental part of our food chain. As they dance from flower to flower, bees transfer pollen to fertilize plants so they can produce seeds and fruit. This not only provides us with hundreds of varieties of fruit and vegetables but it also supports the entire food web, sustaining countless species that rely on these plants for survival. In addition, these plants then go on to feed livestock, which ultimately become meat for our consumption, too. Every element of the food we eat daily has been influenced, in some way, by these tiny creatures.
Because bees play a crucial role in our food cycle, they spend much of their time in farmlands. But over the past 50 years, these landscapes have become increasingly dangerous to them. Imagine trying to do your job while toxic chemicals fill the air you breathe and coat the food you eat. If you manage to survive that, you still have to dodge industrial machinery – spinning blades, massive wheels, and heavy equipment barreling toward you. And after all that effort, when you finally return home, you might find it gone, cleared away, leaving you displaced, starving, and vulnerable.
Now, this may seem extreme, but for many bee species, it is a reality. The demand for fast-growing, long-lasting, and visually flawless food has led to increased use of herbicides and pesticides. While these chemicals meet our needs in the short-term, they are eliminating bees, one of the most essential links in our food system.
How Bee Loss Reshapes The World
The decline of bees threatens entire ecosystems, and without them, the world around us would look very different. So, what exactly are the long-term effects of losing these vital creatures?
Disrupted Food Production
Bee loss poses a very real threat to agricultural production all over the world. In Europe, around 80% of wildflower and crop species depend entirely on bee pollination for fertilisation. While most cereal crops rely on wind for pollination, 90% of the crops consumed worldwide are pollinated by bees, including most fruit and vegetables. Without them, we would have to find other, more labor intensive, less efficient ways to pollinate our crops. Some techniques include hand pollination (which is incredibly time-consuming) and drone pollination (very expensive). No human alternative can compare to the effectiveness and specialty that bees possess when it comes to pollination. In short, we cannot do their job at the same scale or speed.
A threat to food production means a threat to food security. Fewer crops mean food shortages, leading to higher food prices. And we are already seeing the impact of this in some parts of the world. In California, for example, beekeepers noticed a significant reduction in bee numbers from June 2024 to February 2025. They reported an average loss of 60%, a shortage of up to 500,000 hives that were crucial in almond pollination.
The lack of crucial pollination from bees would mean fewer varieties of fruit and vegetables, which would not only affect our diet but that of livestock, too. This ultimately means disruption to the meat and dairy industry.
Loss of Biodiversity
Less variety in plant species affects us as well as whole ecosystems and the species that depend on them. Bee loss threatens the number and diversity of many plant species, which would struggle to reproduce without the work of bees to pollinate them. Species like wild orchids, which are widely declining, rely exclusively on bee pollination.
As with any loss of biodiversity, there is always a chain reaction felt in the wider environment. It is a vicious cycle: fewer flowering plants mean less bees, but fewer bees mean less flowers. Fewer plants mean less forage and shelter for a range of herbivores, and less herbivores means the secondary consumers that eat them would go without. This leads to more competition and less food within the entire food chain.
Aside from directly impacting biodiversity, pollinators like bees contribute significantly to the functioning of ecosystems, way beyond just the food chain. Their work helps support natural habitats, promote genetic diversity, and maintain the structure of ecosystems.
The most obvious loss in bee decline is plants, and although we have explored what this means for food production and wildlife, we have yet to look at what fewer plants actually means for ecosystem balance and human health.
Plants are vital for all life on earth. Firstly, they help create organic matter, which is essential for soil health and fertility. Healthy soils mean more moisture retention and more support for microbial communities (like fungi and bacteria). Their root systems bind soil together, improving structural integrity and reducing the risk of erosion. They also regulate water by improving infiltration and reducing surface runoff, which leads to flooding. Losing bees would also mean losing the many ecosystem benefits that plants provide.
Economic Impact
It may not be the first thing we consider when looking at how bees impact us, but these little insects contribute significantly to the global economy. Although it is difficult to put an exact price on the work bees do, it is estimated that up to US$577 billion of our global food production is dependent on them. The honey market alone was valued at $8.5 billion in 2022.
The farming sector would be the first to suffer the loss of bees, as fewer bees mean less crop yield. A study on the loss in apple orchards found that a lack of bumblebees led to a loss of half the fruit production. This, in turn, meant farmers saw a 42% decrease in profits.
What is often overlooked is how much it would cost us to do the job bees do. Pollination is a free, natural process. But if we did not have bees to do the job, we would soon see that this seemingly costless process would, in fact, cost us a lot.
To put this into perspective, bees contribute almost 700 million pounds (US$905 million) annually to the UK economy. Employing people to do the job bees do would cost the country at least £1.8 billion. This figure does not include the machinery, research or training required to complete the work, either. And this is assuming we work at the same pace and efficiency that bees do, which is highly unlikely.
Now, let’s imagine we pollinated plants ourselves – what would the cost breakdown look like?
We could first start by trying to hand pollinate, manually transferring pollen by collecting it from one plant and gently brushing it onto another. Not only is this hugely labour intensive but also costly. Using our case study on apple orchards from earlier, this process would cost between $5,000-7,000 per hectare to pollinate. With roughly 153,375 hectares of apple orchards across the US, that racks up to around $880 million annually.
What about we try pollen dusting instead? It is a similar process to hand pollination, except we get machines to do the work instead. Not only does this mean less labour, but the cost is only about $250 per hectare, a much nicer number than before. Unfortunately, trees do not like it. This method is much more inconsistent than bees and can be patchy in its coverage. The work is less precise, and the pollen quality is worse than that of natural pollinators. All of this results in about a 70% decrease in apple yields. If this wasn’t bad enough, the $250 figure quoted did not even include the cost of the skilled people needed to operate the machinery, the machinery itself or its maintenance.
Studies have shown that the cost of artificial pollination is almost 10% higher than the cost of bee pollination services. Ultimately, we cannot reproduce their work to the same quality or efficiency to produce the same revenue.
Could Other Pollinators Fill the Gap?
Bees are not the only pollinators. Butterflies and beetles are also responsible for helping plants reproduce, but their contribution is not quite like that of bees. If bees were to disappear, this would put significant pressure on these species to fill their role. If these species cannot adapt and compensate, whole ecosystems will collapse. In a world with less bees, we would have to rely on these other pollinators – but is this scenario even realistic?
Bees are purposeful pollinators, because their hives’ health and offspring depend entirely on the collected pollen for food. This means they transfer considerably more pollen on a daily basis than other pollinators. Studies have shown that non-bee insects only account for 38% of crop pollination, showing just how much bees alone contribute.
Let’s take butterflies as an example. They are common visitors to wildflowers and are part of the pollinator community. Unlike the pollen-collecting hairs on bees legs, their long, thin legs mean they are simply built less efficiently for the role. Because of this, they contribute to less than 5% of crop pollination.
Moths are another fairly common insect pollinator. While also having the smooth-textured legs that butterflies possess, they are also mostly nocturnal, meaning they do not pollinate crops that often require daytime pollination services.
If other insect species are not suitable, what about birds, or bats? Species like the hummingbird pollinate tubular flowers using their long tongues to grab the pollen. Unfortunately, these species are mostly limited to tropical regions and do not visit many commercial crops. This means that bird pollination contributes to less than 5% of flowering species worldwide. Bats are also specialists, in that they only pollinate a small subset of plants and, like moths, are nocturnal. They are even less suitable to fill the role of bees, only being responsible for less than 1% of global food pollination.
A Crisis We Must Avert
Simply put, the disappearance of bees would be devastating – from a biological, societal and economic standpoint. If we lose bees, we lose far more than honey; our crops, ecosystems and food systems all depend on their pollination. There is no species on earth, including us, that can do their job. We cannot afford to ignore their decline, and protecting them is crucial. It is a responsibility that requires immediate action, for the health of our planet and future generations.
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