What would happen if all bees disappeared from the planet?

If all bees disappeared, the most immediate consequence would be the collapse of pollination for a vast number of plant species. Bees are responsible for pollinating roughly one-third of the world's food supply, including fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. Crops like almonds, apples, blueberries, and cucumbers depend heavily on bee pollination. Without them, yields would drop catastrophically within a single growing season. Wild ecosystems would suffer severely as well. Many flowering plants rely exclusively or primarily on bees for reproduction. Their disappearance would trigger a cascade of extinctions among plant species, which would in turn devastate the animals that depend on those plants for food and habitat. Birds, insects, and mammals would all be affected up the food chain. Human food security would be in crisis. While some crops like wheat, rice, and corn are wind-pollinated and would survive, the diversity of the human diet would shrink dramatically. Prices for bee-pollinated foods would skyrocket, and nutritional deficiencies would become widespread, particularly in developing nations. The economic loss has been estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Other pollinators like butterflies, moths, flies, and bats exist, but they are far less efficient and numerous than bees. They could not realistically compensate for the loss at the scale required to sustain current agricultural systems or wild plant diversity. The long-term result would likely be widespread famine, ecosystem collapse, and a fundamental restructuring of life on Earth. Bees are considered a keystone species precisely because their removal would trigger disproportionately large effects throughout the biosphere.