The Pros And Cons Of Bees

What would happen if the bees die

Something terrible is happening to bees. Hundreds of millions of them are either vanishing or dropping dead. Beekeepers are tearing their hives out in frustration.
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Look how cute these things are?!
Fingers are pointing at a number of contributing factors. Relatively new pesticides designed to impregnate the seeds of crops before they have grown could be a potential problem. Climate change has been isolated as a likely cause (though to be fair climate change could plausibly be blamed for a raucous sex scandal in the tabloids these days). The nasty Varroa mite, although present since the end of World War II, is now getting the blame for laying waste to hoardes of bees like some kind of insectoid Goebbels.
Before mass agriculture became de rigeur, reducing plantlife to far-reaching swathes of identical crops, a number of insects were responsible for pollinating plants. As farming became more efficient and reduced the once varied landscape to a monotone green, so the farmers began to encourage the populations of bees to carry pollen from one flower to another. This is a fantastic arrangement - as long as bees stick around. As bees became more and more successful, and better integrated with the farming lifecycle, other species started to die out, until eventually bees are now responsible for a third of all pollination in America, with similar figures elsewhere. Around such a contentious issue one thing is clear: we need bees.
Rudimentary foodstuffs like apples, pears, cucumbers and strawberries are dependent on farming and bees to keep ticking over at the rate now required for the mass market. Bees are not the most efficient pollinators but the agricultural industries we depend on for our everyday living have been built around them. Given a chance, nature would reassert itself and other pollinators would return to areas now dominated by bees, but they would not be able to pollinate on the scale required in modern