Will We Still Have Fruit if Bees Die Off? (2024)

A photo has been circulating for a while that suggests our grocery stores will look like this in a world without bees. Is that true? Will our food choices be radically limited, come the future Beepocalypse?

We already know what raising fruit without honey bees looks like. In a remote area in China, humans pollinate 100% of fruit trees by hand. Armed with pollen-loaded paintbrushes and cigarette filters, people swarm around pear and apple trees in spring. The reason why they hand pollinate is not what you think, though. Honey bees are still present in these areas of hand pollination, and many fruit growers also keep bees for honey.

Hand pollination in China has as much to do with economics and fruit biology as it does with bees. In the early 1990s, farmers of marginal lands in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region--an area spanning parts of Nepal, China, Pakistan, and India--realized that apples could be a major cash crop. Their land was mountainous and hard to farm, so tree fruits were ideally suited to the region. A major shift occurred from subsistence farming to fruit crops. The payoffs were large -- in some areas, farmers quadrupled their income. Now they had cash on hand to send kids to school and build roads. Quality of life improved.

With that early success, farmers found that certain varieties of apples and pears sold better than others. As new orchards went in, more and more of the same cultivars of apples were planted. And that is when things started to go wrong.

Delicious plant genitals

A fruit is a plant ovary with embryos (seeds) inside. It's how plants reproduce. Bees and other pollinators serve as plant sexual surrogates by spreading pollen (plant sperm!) around to flower ovaries. A flower has to be pollinated to "set fruit" or begin to create the juicy ovaries that will become apples.

Some fruits are self-pollinating, and can fertilize themselves without any bees involved. The Navel Oranges seen in the photo at the top are a good example of a fruit that can self-pollinate. Most fruit trees -- pears and apples in particular -- are self-sterile for their own pollen. If you plant all Royal Delicious apples, for example, you won't get fruit, with or without bees. Just as we don't often marry our cousins, apple and pear trees require cross-pollination with "pollinizer varieties" that are not closely related to produce a full crop of fruit.

Clearing marginal lands for agriculture destroyed nesting and food resources native pollinator species needed. The problem with insects as commercial pollinators is that they can't just appear for 2 weeks, pollinate your plants, and disappear. They have to have something to eat the rest of the year, and a place to live. Clearing mountain forests got rid of habitat that pollinators needed.

Farmers planting new trees in their orchards also made a logical economic choice: plant just tree varieties that make marketable fruit. The consequences of that choice, though, were that fruit set was radically reduced. Because the trees planted were the same variety, they were self-sterile.

Farmers did plant a few of what are called "pollinizer" trees--trees that serve as pollen donors. Pollinizer varieties usually don't have pretty fruit, which means that farmers give up potential income when they plant them. The recommended mix of fruiting trees and pollinizer trees in orchards is 70:30 for proper fruit set. In most fruit orchards in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, less than 10% of the trees were pollinizer varieties in the late 1990s. There just wasn't enough plant sperm to go around.