No mass starvation, because the grains that make up the bulk of our diet are not at risk. (Wind-pollinated.) So we’d have corn, bread, oatmeal, etc. And certain fruits, such as grapes, are wind-pollinated or self-fertilizing.
And then there’s human pollination, as they’re doing in China. (Take
millions of peasants, hand them bundles of chicken feathers, and let
them climb through the fruit trees, touching every flower with a bit of
pollen from a bucket.) What we’d have is extraordinarily high prices
for most of the fruits and vegetables that provide our vitamins and
antioxidants, if they could be found at all. And the beef and dairy
industry, as Michael Pollan has pointed out, is switching more and more
away from natural forage to corn, even though corn makes cattle sick,
because it’s cheaper to feed corn and administer antibiotics to sick
cattle than it is to use nature pasture. So we’d still have a beef
industry, though a freaky one.
But honeybees aren’t on the edge of going extinct. They are, however,
on the edge of not being able to provide all the pollination we’ve
asked of them.
