bees are a really interesting kind of insect you're probably familiar with honeybees and youve probably seen bumblebees but they're actually about 20,000 species of bees all around the world bees are found in almost all habitats and they play a really vital role they might look different they might have different names but they almost all do the same basic thing for us and for the environment and that's that they pollinate um plants and they help make sure that plants can reproduce bees are vital for most of the foods that we eat one in every three bites of food we take on any given day was probably helped Along by a bee somewhere among the top 100 crops that make up 90% of people's diets around the world bees are responsible for pollinating more than 70 of them it's easy to take bees for granted so one way to appreciate them is to imagine what would happen if they were to disappear what would it be like to have a world without bees my name is John hookstra and I'm the chief scientist for World Wildlife Fund so the first thing that would happen if bees were to disappear is that the production of different fruits in different crops would suddenly fall off dramatically for instance the agave plant which is used to make tequila uh reproduction would go down to 1 3,000 of what it would be with bees and so we'd see that happening with crop after crop cherries apples almonds blueberries pumpkins squash cucumbers the reproduction would fall off and the first people to feel that would probably be farmers who would lose income they'd see their their incomes dwindling a study conducted in Costa Rica with coffee Farmers found that the the bees increase their income by $60,000 a year so if the bees were to disappear Farmers would immediately see a hit in their pocketbook that would feed forward to the rest of us who would no longer see all these fruits vegetables nuts that depend on bees for pollination would suddenly become much less abundant so if we were able to get them they would probably cost us a lot more money but more than likely we simply wouldn't have those Foods in our diet anymore and we'd be stuck with what I think would be a pretty bland diet of grains not only are bees vitally important for human food but they're also vitally important for our ecosystems for the same reason they're responsible for pollinating plants and enabling those plants to reproduce so if we lost bees we'd see many many of the plants in the world struggling to reproduce and over time dying off and so we'd see the richness of our forests and our grasslands and other habitats eroding as bees were no longer there to pollinate those plants and help them reproduce if we were to lose those bees and we started to lose those plants that would have Echo effects for people in terms of reducing the resilience of those natural systems to uh protect our soil to provide clean water to our cities just to provide Beauty bees are certainly important for pollinating food crops but they're also important for other crops that touch our lives every day like cotton if it weren't for bees pollinating cotton we all might have to be wearing polyester I wouldn't want to live in a world without bees but we're observing some declines in Bee populations around the world and it looks to be a number of factors coming together all at once one of them is pesticides while there's legitimate use for pesticides and controlling unwanted and damaging CR pests we need to make sure that those chemicals don't have unwanted effect on our bees world without bees in the worst case it wouldn't just be that our diet was Bland it might be that we don't have enough food to go around anymore but I think that the direct tangible importance of bees for all the food that we count on it certainly makes that u a possibility I wouldn't want to try out [Music]