It’s a warm summer day in July. You are having a BBQ with all of your friends. As you go to take a sip of Coke out of the can, you see a pesky bee flying around. You decide it’s annoying and you don’t want it to sting you, so you start swatting at it. It won’t go away, so you end up killing it instead.

Every time you kill a bee and think you are doing a good service to the people, you are not. The more bees that die, the worse off humans are in the long run. Every time you decide to kill a bee hive by your house, you are hurting humans. Every time the earth experiences deforestation for mass farming along with heavy pesticide use for crops, we are hurting humans.

According to bees.org, “since the late 1990’s beekeepers around the world have observed a sudden disappearance, and report unusually high rates of decline in honeybee colonies.”

Honeybees are a keystone species around the world. Without them, it’s estimated that humans would only have about four years left on Earth. This may sound crazy, but it’s true.

If bees went extinct, we would experience a food shortage shortly after. This would be due to the amount of crops not being pollinated. According to honeybeelove.org, bees pollinate about 80 percent of the world’s plants, which includes 90 crops. They are also responsible for $15 billion dollars in U.S. agricultural crops each year.

Not only would there be shortages, but animals that eat these foods would likely disappear off the food chain all together. We as humans would also experience higher prices for foods that are usually cheap, such as paying $16 for an apple.

Clothes made from cotton would become too expensive to afford. This is because cotton plants don’t exist without bees.

In the absence of bees, we would also run out of biofuel, which then would require us to rely mainly on fossil fuel. This could lead to a quicker use of all fossil fuels, and possibly running out.

Basically, the world would be in chaos without bees. We cannot be so ignorant to the fact that we think we are better than the rest of the species on this Earth. Everything is connected in one way or another.

Next time you go to swat a bee, I hope you think twice, it may just be leading us to the end of the world.