Why Are Bees Important? Pollination, Food and Ecosystems

How bees pollinate plants

Pollination is the transfer of pollen, the plant’s male cells, to the female part of a flower of the same species. Many plants cannot do this on their own, and they pay animals to do it with nectar and extra pollen. Bees are built for the job: their bodies are covered in branched hairs that pick up pollen, and unlike most other flower visitors they collect pollen deliberately to feed their young.

A foraging bee also tends to stick to one kind of flower on each trip, a habit called flower constancy, so the pollen it carries ends up on the right plant. Some bees can do things others cannot. Bumblebees such as the buff-tailed bumblebee use buzz pollination, vibrating their flight muscles to shake pollen out of flowers like tomatoes and blueberries, which honey bees cannot do.

How much of our food depends on bees?

A widely cited 2007 review led by Alexandra-Maria Klein found that 87 of the 115 leading food crops worldwide benefit from animal pollination. These crops supply about 35 percent of global food production by volume. Pollination does not decide all of their yield, though: the 2016 global assessment by IPBES, the intergovernmental science panel on biodiversity, estimated that 5–8 percent of all crop production is directly due to animal pollination, worth an estimated US$235–577 billion a year.

Animal-pollinated crops are also the most nutritious part of the diet, supplying much of our vitamin A, vitamin C, folate and healthy fats.

Honey bees versus wild bees

The western honey bee is the best-known pollinator because beekeepers can move hives to wherever crops are flowering. In California, a large share of all the honey bee colonies in the United States is trucked into the almond orchards each February, the largest managed pollination event in the world.

But honey bees are only one species among more than 20,000 bees worldwide, including about 2,000 in Europe and about 4,000 native to the United States and Canada. Studies of crops on several continents have shown that wild bees often pollinate more effectively per visit, and that fields visited by many kinds of wild insects set more fruit even when honey bees are plentiful. Wild bees do most of the pollination of wildflowers, and some plants depend on just a few species, such as the squash bees of North America, which specialize in pumpkins and squash.

Why bees matter for ecosystems

Bees keep wild plant communities going. Seeds, berries and fruits that result from bee pollination feed birds, mammals and insects, and the plants themselves hold soil, shelter wildlife and store carbon. Meadows, heathland, hedgerows and woodland edges all rely on a mix of bees, flies, butterflies and beetles visiting their flowers.

Bees are part of food webs in another way, too: they are prey for birds such as bee-eaters, for spiders, hornets and many other animals. Losing bees would affect far more than the plants they pollinate.

Honey, wax and other bee products

Bees also give people products. Honey bees make honey, about 1.8 million tonnes of which is produced around the world each year, and beeswax, used in candles, cosmetics, polishes and food coatings. Beekeepers also collect pollen, propolis and royal jelly. Stingless bees supply honey in parts of the tropics, and the honey bee is a key animal for scientific research on learning, memory and social behavior; see how bees make honey.

What would happen if bees disappeared?

Despite a popular quote wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, people would not die out within a few years. Staple grains such as wheat, rice and corn are wind-pollinated, and potatoes are grown from tubers. But many fruits, vegetables, nuts, oil seeds and spices would become scarce and expensive, and diets would become less varied and less healthy.

The bigger risk is to nature. The IUCN’s updated European assessment of October 2025 found that at least 172 of 1,928 wild bee species, about 10 percent, are threatened with extinction, and that wild honey bee colonies in the EU are Endangered. Several North American bumblebees have also declined sharply. The main causes are loss of flower-rich habitat, pesticides, disease and climate change. For the current picture, see are bees endangered?.