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Comment by xwdv | Hacker News Reader

What will happen when bees go extinct?

Edit: I don’t understand the vicious pointless downvotes over this question.

Not a beekeeper but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots from bee extinction to ecological collapse. No pollinators leads to decreased germination which leads to less food for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on

Bees aren't the only pollinators out there. Yes, they are super important, but others exist. https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/animals-ecology/incredibl...

Aren't the others also at risk?

That's a good point. We are not being bad to honey bees or bees alone. We are killing everything.

> Not a beekeeper but it’s pretty easy to connect the dots from bee extinction to ecological collapse.

How is that an easy connection? Your argument essentially says without bees then nature as we know it falls apart catastrophically - I am incredulous you could interpret this as obvious. Species go extinct all the time and yet Earth is still doing just fine, apart from the damage humans are doing to it.

> No pollinators

Bees are not the only pollinators

> leads to decreased germination

A decrease is not the same as elimination

> which leads to less food

A decrease is not the same as elimination

> for the lower levels of the food chain and on and on

Your argument is a about knock-on effects, which certainly exist. But you seem to think if any point in the chain breaks, it leads to ecological collapse. Why do you assume nature is so fragile? I am not a biologist and maybe bees are special or there is something I do not understand, but I certainly don't think it's an obvious conclusion.

You're making a leap from "collapse" to "elimination". Searching for "GDP collapse", the first result I get is referring to a global 4.3% predicted collapse for 2020. People seem to be taking that pretty hard.

Fair point. Thank you.

Nature might endure what we throw at it, we might not. When people say that humans are ruining the planet, maybe a few people are actually worried about the rock, but most of us are worried about having an ecosystem compatible with our civilization.

You might want to investigate about the sparrows in china, quick version; a campaign to exterminate the sparrows to increase grain production ended up with famines.

I'm pretty sure honey bees are relatively safe as long as there are beekeepers. As I noted above, there are thousands of solitary and/or wild bee species that are in real danger. They pollinate an important part of the plants. Their loss would probably trigger chain reactions that we should avoid.

Is that a real risk? I thought it was pretty straightforward to breed more of them. For now. The colony collapse problem is real, but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct.

> but I haven't heard any serious discussion of honeybees going extinct.

In Europe it is..in fact it was the main-theme 3 years ago. And not just bees but insects overall...the honeybee was just the friendly looking ambassador for that message.

The number of hives in New Zealand has roughly doubled in 5 years - so much so that overstocking is a huge problem.

One small data point, but too many and too few are both bad. https://www.airborne.co.nz/pages/bee-keeping-statistics-new-...

Again it's NOT about just Honeybees:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_populations

Honey bees haven’t existed in America before 1600, so I suppose we’ll be without one of the invasive species.

Bees overall are dying not just honeybees.

Peoples with brushes on trees and bushes...and for everything that doesn't make money and is dependent on bees will go extinct too (flowers, trees etc..). And now back to school.

We lose another beautiful creature. People quibbling over there being other pollinators are being quite dense.

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