29/05/2026
So What if the Bee Disappeared?
If the bee disappeared one morning,
the world would not collapse all at once.
There would be no dramatic silence,
no sudden darkness,
no sudden loss.
At first,
there would simply be less.
Less clover feeding bees in summer,
less fruit swelling on orchard branches,
less seed carried forward into another spring.
Gardens would start to forget themselves.
The bright conversations between flowers
would slowly fall quiet.
Birdsong would thin in places.
Fields would lose their colour.
Supermarket shelves would look full for a while,
but the variety of the world would begin to narrow—
fewer berries, fewer nuts, fewer vegetables,
fewer small wild things feeding larger ones.
And somewhere, perhaps unnoticed at first,
human beings would lose another connection to the living earth.
Because bees are not just makers of honey and pollinators—
they are carriers of continuation,
moving life from flower to flower,
season to season.
A world without bees
would not simply be hungrier.
It would be lonelier too.
A poem by a bee. 🐝
Photo is of a solitary European wool carder bee, taken in my mother’s garden in Pāpāmoa.
