Most major crops in the world essential to human survival don’t need bees to pollinate but…

Bees don’t pollinate grains, which are cultivated forms of grass. So wheat, rice, and corn would survive. Nor do bees pollinate sugarcane or sugar beets, another huge source of calories for humans.

The likely reality of a bee-free future is more subtle than – could we survive. We could survive without them, but life would be nasty, brutish, and short.

In 2011, a team of researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara released a study showing that most of the nutritional diversity in the human diet comes from foods that are pollinated by bats and insects, such as bees. The majority of dietary lipids, calcium, fluoride, iron, carotenoids, lycopene, beta-cryptoxanthin, and the vitamins A, C, and E consumed worldwide come from crops that require pollinators.

Our diets are embarrassingly unhealthy. and because of it, technically we could easily satisfy our caloric requirements with little or no pollination from bees. But you really wouldn’t want to.

Source: Natural Resources Defence Council

 

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