Cherish your bees

Did you know …

That if all the bees on the planet were to disappear, humans would die out within ten minutes? It’s true!

Noted bee expert Albert Einstein was quoted years after his death as having said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe, then man would have only four years of life left.” Unless there’s a caveat hidden in that statement—that bees, perhaps, would continue to thrive, but only deep underground—modern research suggests that Professor “I love bees” Einstein was being extremely generous with his numbers. All evidence indicates that humans would have much closer to four minutes to live. Ten at the most.

Scientists at the University of Idaho proved this with an experiment that placed a healthy human and a bee in a refrigerator-sized lead chamber. Monitoring equipment was placed inside the box, but all contact with outside bees and humans was cut off, effectively creating a little model of a human-bee-Earth ecosystem. When the researchers opened the box one hour later, they discovered both the bee and the human dead! The bee looked normal dead, and the person looked puffy dead. The chamber’s “black box” revealed that the bee died several minutes before the human, whose vital signs spiked in the moments after the bee’s death, and then quickly declined to nothing in the following minutes.

Scientists are still sorting through the data, but the current hypothesis is that after the bee died (for whatever reason), the human died of sadness. His body, after all, was a dull blue (the color of sadness) and all puffed up like a balloon (the metaphor of sadness). Imagining this phenomenon on a global scale is truly horrifying.