Einstein on bees, revisited

Wed Aug 28 00:01:12 UTC 2013

In 2007 and 2012 Bonnie Taylor-Blake shared with list members her
wonderful exploration of the Einstein attributed quotation about a
bee-less apocalypse. Here is a version of the popular quote:

[Begin excerpt]
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."
[End excerpt]

Now the QI website has an analysis acknowledging Bonnie, John
McChesney-Young and others. Feedback welcome:

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/27/einstein-bees/

Thanks, Garson

On Fri, Jun 29, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Bonnie Taylor-Blake
<b.taylorblake at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Bonnie Taylor-Blake <b.taylorblake at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Einstein on bees, revisited
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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