Bee Mine

Since global warming, while still threatening everyone, has become somewhat old hat for the news media, it would seem that a new threat is assailing man kind: the loss of honey bees. One quotation that has been popularly used and attributed to Einstein is that if bees die out, then man has four years to live. This is based on the idea that the crops that man kind plants are reliant on honey bees for polination, and would therefore send humanity into starvation if bees died out completely. Snopes.com has classified the claim that Einstein ever said this as uncertain. Until 1994, it seems that no such reference had made it to press (which is why writers should always site their references).
Even if Einstein did say it though, he was not an authority on the subject. Certainly he was a briliant physicist and philosopher, but not a biologist. I say that man kind will not die out as a result of the loss of honey bees. Things won't be super, there will be a difficult adjustment periord, but loss of honeybees alone will not kill us off. The main reason for this is that the majority of crops that we grow are self or wind pollenated. All the grasses (corn, wheat, rice, barley, oats) as well as many legumes (peanuts) and soybeans will be wholey unaffected. Furthermore, honeybees are not the only pollenators. North America alone has more than 3500 species of native bees (most of which don't produce colonies though) which would rise to fill the vacated niche. Also, many species of wasps, beetles, flies, butterflies, moths, ants, bats and hummingbirds also pollenate flowers. Honey bees are not even native to the western hemisphere.
The human reaction to a decrease in honey bees is already seen. Many bee keepers truck their hives from field to field, following the bloom north and are paid well for it. The use of monoculture (only one type of crop in an area) is also declining in some areas so that bees will have a more consistant food suply throughout the year. Similarly, proximity to native grassland or forest also bolster pollination of many crops because native pollinators are more abundant. In the end, if things become too unmanageable, it is likely that new crops or hybrids that don't rely so much on honey bees will be implemented and that agricultural engineers might even produce a mechanical method for mass pollination.
The moral to be learned from this is not that man-kind is doomed, but that we are going to have to learn to be good stuards of our planet, for its sake and for ours.