Bread would be fine

What If Every Bee Vanished?

We would not starve. We would lose almost everything worth eating.

The first group would not notice. The second one is the whole problem.

Step 1 of 5

The big staple crops never needed bees.

Wheat, rice, maize, barley and oats are grasses, and grasses are pollinated by wind. Between them they supply most of the calories eaten on Earth, and not one of them would be affected.
Step 2 of 5

But the plate loses its colour.

Not the calories. The reasons for eating.

Roughly a third of what we eat by volume depends on animal pollinators. It is the interesting third: apples, cherries, blueberries, melons, almonds, avocados, cucumbers, coffee and cocoa all go.
Step 3 of 5

Some of it can be done by hand — badly.

Where pollinators have already been lost, people do the job with brushes, flower by flower. It works, and it is so slow and expensive that it is only ever worth it for high-value crops.
Step 4 of 5

Bees are not the only pollinators.

Butterflies, moths, hoverflies, beetles, wasps, bats and birds all carry pollen. Some plants depend on exactly one of them — a fig has its own species of wasp and nothing else will do.
Step 5 of 5

It is not all-or-nothing, and that is the actual worry.

No one expects every bee to vanish at once. What is happening is a slow thinning — fewer species, fewer individuals, in more places. A crop does not fail when the last bee goes; it fails when there are not quite enough.

Why bees bother with flowers at all — and why they stay loyal to one kind at a time — is its own page.

The short version

Losing every bee would not cost us bread or rice; it would cost us fruit, coffee, chocolate and most of what makes food interesting.

Look at a plate and sort it into wind-pollinated and animal-pollinated. The bread and rice stay. Almost nothing else does.