While much of the human diet is made up of wind-pollinated cereal grains like wheat and corn, the fruits and vegetables necessary to our nutritional well-being are largely pollinated by bees. Hand and mechanical pollination is possible for certain foods and flowers on a smaller scale, but it would not be possible for humans to pollinate the amount of these crops necessary to feed the global masses, resulting in famine across the world.

Additionally, such abrupt changes in the global climate and soil conditions would make for a dire shortage in food. According to Nature Education, soil is “the foundation of agriculture.” Without proper soil health, growing successful crops with high yields is nearly impossible. What’s more, humans rely on a certain amount of consistency in the Earth’s climatic conditions (namely heat/cold and rain) to ensure crop health. Erratic or extreme conditions will make farming increasingly difficult, in some cases requiring regions to change crops entirely, altering the staples which different global cuisines have come to rely on. In short, not only would we have bland diets, but we would not be able to produce enough food for everyone to eat.

While hand and mechanical pollination is possible, it is incredibly expensive. According to Vice, MIT researchers calculated the cost of hand-pollinating roughly 2 acres of an apple orchard to be between $5,715 and $7,135, while the current cost using bees is about $90. Consumers would shoulder the majority of that massive price increase. Basically, food would be incredibly expensive.

As food insecurity already affects 12% of the American population (42 million people) and 25% of the world (1.9 billion people), such drastic price hikes would significantly up food insecurity across the world. There would be struggles in not only growing enough food to feed the masses but ensuring that they are able to afford it. Additionally, given that there are already severe problems with the global distribution of food — there is enough food on Earth to feed everyone, yet calories are often diverted from those in need to be given to livestock and, in turn, wealthier populations — such scarcity and economic inhibitors would add to the already dramatic inequality in the food system.

According to the folks at Just Bee, while bees aren’t necessary to produce cotton, they do increase the “quantity and quality of the cotton lint.” This means that without our fuzzy friends, there would be massive changes in available natural fibers. Cotton is the second-most-produced textile in the world behind polyester, accounting for 24.4% of the global market share. All the other natural fibers available make up only roughly 7% of the global market, meaning a loss of cotton would leave the vast majority of the market up to man-made fibers. Hello, polyester!

Additionally, what little of the cotton market that remains intact would not look the same as it does today. Normally inexpensive items like cotton undergarments and T-shirts would become hot commodities, and pricer items like mattresses and linens would become too expensive for many to afford. What little cotton there was would be less durable, making cotton goods a worse investment.

While polyester and other man-made fibers can be great for certain things, they are not very breathable and are often blended with cotton to prevent heat and odor buildup. What’s worse, polyester releases tons of microplastics into the water system every time it’s washed, even contributing as much as 75% of the Arctic Ocean’s plastic pollution. Lastly, polyester is petroleum-based, which makes it very carbon-intensive. A shift in the market away from cotton and toward polyester could have negative implications for the climate, which would compound many of the issues caused by a lack of bees.

Bad news for all the coffee lovers out there: Bees play a large role in the production of coffee beans. Coffee plants come in two varieties, arabica and robusta. The plants have different flavor profiles, are cultivated in different areas of the world, and, it turns out, have different pollination needs. While arabica plants can wind-pollinate by themselves (although they produce up to 16% more berries when bees are present), robusta plants require the hard work of bees to cross-pollinate. As robusta accounts for 40% of global coffee production, the death of all the world’s bees would spell serious disaster for the coffee industry (via Bees for Life). 

Bee extinction would cause coffee supplies to sharply decline, and, predictably, prices would severely increase. If you think that latte is expensive now, think how much it would be if nearly half the world’s coffee supply was cut off? Bees also increase the quality of the crop, which means the coffee that would remain on Earth wouldn’t be as good, anyway.

And don’t go thinking you can fall back on tea. Camellia sinensis, aka the tea plant, is pollinated by bees. And when we say “tea,” we mean almost every single tea: Black, green, oolong, white, and dark teas all come from Camellia sinensis.

In recent years, bee populations have declined significantly due to a variety of reasons. In fact, the U.S. saw a 60% decline in bees between 1947 and 2008 (via Greenpeace), making the threat of losing bees for good a serious one. Invasive mites, called Varroa mites, have become a problem. They can cause malformation in baby bees, inability for adult bees to find the hive if they leave, multiple diseases, and the eventual collapse of a colony. Pesticides from commercial farms, backyard gardens, and groundskeeping can also make their way into hives, poisoning individual bees and potentially entire colonies. Other harsh agricultural practices like monocropping over large swaths of land means a lack of feeding space for bees, which has also devastated populations. Bees will either be stuck eating one type of flower, leading to malnutrition, or will be unable to cross an entire farm of wind-pollinators, causing them to die in their search for food.

Lastly, colony collapse disorder has become a severe threat to bees in the past two decades. Scientists have yet to determine the root cause of the disorder, which causes the abandonment of the hive by healthy adult bees. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the queen and a few nurses remain, but their efforts are not enough to support the hive. Although 60% of national colony loss was attributed to colony collapse disorder in 2008, numbers have improved, with only 30% of hive deaths implicated in 2013 (via National Pesticide Information Center).