Einstein on bees, revisited

[Bonnie Taylor-Blake]

Back in 2007 I asked the group about a then-circulating belief that
Einstein had made the following pronouncement about bees.

"If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would
only have four years of life left.  No more bees, no more pollination,
no more plants, no more animals, no more man."

At the time I hadn't been able to push this (mis)attribution back to a
date earlier than 1994 [1].  Here's an update.


Blogger Ray Girvan not long ago noted that a very similar attribution
to Einstein had appeared in apiculture literature as early as the
mid-1960s [2].  Einstein biographer Alice Calaprice last year
speculated that this general (mis)attribution was probably based on
his letter of December 12, 1951 to schoolchildren.  (No bees,
however.)

"Dear Children: ... Without sunlight there is:  no wheat, no bread, no
grass, no cattle, no meat, no milk, and everything would be frozen. No
LIFE.  [Calaprice, _Ultimate Quotable Einstein_ (2011), p. 82.]


It's possible that the current form of the bee quotation had been
modeled after that 1951 letter, but Einstein had been linked -- at
least in apiculture circles -- to a bee-less apocalypse as early as
January, 1941.  Google Books has now yielded some clues that lead us
to *The Canadian Bee Journal*.

"Mr. McArthur, you are quite right when you say that few of us
understand the worth of our numerous insects.  Yes, every kind of
animal or insect is a link in the endless chain of nature and, if a
link is removed, it is a long time before the chain serves again its
full purpose.  If I remember well, it was Einstein who said:  'Remove
the bee from the earth and at the same stroke you remove at least one
hundred thousand plants that will not survive.'"  [Ernest A. Fortin,
"Comments from Quebec," January 1941, p. 13.]


Two years ago Ray Girvan noted that a similar attribution to Darwin
had appeared in a French apiculture publication in 1906 [3].

"La vie de l'homme serait rendue extrêmement difficile si l'abeille
venait à disparaître."  (Or, "The life of man would be made extremely
difficult if the bee disappeared.")

Girvan couldn't find such a concise statement in Darwin's writings,
but speculated that "[t]he use of [Darwin's] name to give authority to
the assertion looks a definite precursor to the fake attribution of
the more elaborate scare story to Einstein."


As far as I can tell, Darwin didn't exactly write about man's
dependence on bees, but in _On the Origin of Species_ he did discuss
the interconnectedness of "humble-bees," red clover, mice, and cats
[see 4].  This example of ecological association has been paraphrased,
sometimes without attribution, in the years since.  Here are a couple
Darwin-less versions that put the emphasis on cats, but that retain
bees in the equation.  Note the repetition of "no" in the forms below.

[From *The British Bee Journal*, 16 June 1887, p. 255; via Google Books.]

"In the United States, hive-bees never suck red clover.  In England
they only suck it through holes made by bumble-bees.  The clover
cannot be fertilised by the hive-bee -- it is too small -- but it is
cross-fertilised by the bumble-bee.  Hence one gentleman has made this
statement:  The safety of England depends on the number of cats she
keeps.  He proves his proposition thus:  Without the aid of
bumble-bees the red clover could not be fertilised.  Bumble-bees make
their nests on the ground, where they are the prey of mice.  Cats
destroy the mice and give the bees a chance to live.  Hence he
reasons, no cats, many mice; many mice, no bumble-bees; no bees, no
clover; no clover, no cattle; no cattle, no beef; and without beef
where would the Englishman be?  -- Prof. W.W. Cooke (American Bee
Journal)"

[From F.R. Townsend, "Cats and Clover," a letter to the editor, *The
New York Times*, 27 March 1913.]

"The only insect that will fertilize the red clover is the humble bee.
 Now, mice just love humble bees' nests, and cats love mice.  No cats,
no humble bees, no clover.  Yet the red clover enriches the milk for
our babies, so no cats, no humble bees, no healthy babies.  'He doeth
all things well.'  The great law of nature requires cats."


So, I think Ray Girvan is right in noting that 1906 connection to
Darwin.  The bee quote attributed to Einstein likely derived from a
perhaps attribution-less re-articulation of Darwin's comment in _On
the Origin of Species_.  At some more point someone applied the name
of a famous 20th-century scientist (theoretical physicist) to
something a famous 19th-century scientist (naturalist) had (sort of)
written.

By the way, as others have noted, Einstein *did* write about ants and
bees as social animals, but not as organisms we depend on.

-- Bonnie


[1] http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0704C&L=ADS-L&P=R4608

[2] http://jsbookreader.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/tracking-bee-story.html

[3] http://jsbookreader.blogspot.com/2010/05/that-bee-story-again.html

[4]  From _On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection_
(Ch. 3. Struggle for Existence; 5.  Complex Relations of All Animals
and Plants to Each Other in the Struggle for Existence).

I am tempted to give one more instance showing how plants and animals,
remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex
relations. I shall hereafter have occasion to show that the exotic
Lobelia fulgens is never visited in my garden by insects, and
consequently, from its peculiar structure, never sets a seed. Nearly
all our orchidaceous plants absolutely require the visits of insects
to remove their pollen-masses and thus to fertilise them. I find from
experiments that humble-bees are almost indispensable to the
fertilisation of the heartsease (Viola tricolor), for other bees do
not visit this flower. I have also found that the visits of bees are
necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; for instance
twenty heads of Dutch clover (Trifolium repens) yielded 2,290 seeds,
but twenty other heads, protected from bees, produced not one. Again,
100 heads of red clover (T. pratense) produced 2,700 seeds, but the
same number of protected heads produced not a single seed. Humble bees
alone visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach the nectar. It has
been suggested that moths may fertilise the clovers; but I doubt
whether they could do so in the case of the red clover, from their
weight not being sufficient to depress the wing petals. Hence we may
infer as highly probable that, if the whole genus of humble-bees
became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover
would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees
in any district depends in a great measure upon the number of
field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Colonel Newman,
who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that
"more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England."
Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on
the number of cats; and Colonel Newman says, "Near villages and small
towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than
elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the
mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal
in large numbers in a district might determine, through the
intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain
flowers in that district!

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