Bees, Biodiversity, and Human Priorities

Question

Are bees still under tremendous distress, and are their numbers reducing rapidly?

ChatGPT

Yes. Bees are still under substantial pressure, but the situation is more nuanced than saying that all bees are rapidly disappearing.

What is happening?

Wild bees are genuinely declining in many places. Scientists have documented reductions in the abundance, diversity, and geographic ranges of wild bees, particularly in heavily industrialized regions of Europe and North America.

Managed honey bees are a different story. Beekeepers can replace colonies that die, so the number of managed colonies is not a straightforward measure of the total wild-bee population.

Colony losses remain extremely high in the United States. The latest 2025–26 U.S. Beekeeping Survey estimated that beekeepers lost 39.9 percent of their managed honey-bee colonies over the year. That is an improvement from the extraordinary 55 percent or more losses of the previous two years, but it is still a very high mortality rate.

USDA data also show that the number of U.S. colonies producing honey in 2025 was 7 percent lower than in 2024, while honey production fell 14 percent.

Why are bees struggling?

It is not one single problem. Several pressures interact:

• Loss of habitat and flowers, resulting in less food and fewer nesting sites.
• Pesticides, including effects that are not necessarily immediately lethal but can impair bees.
• Varroa mites and viruses, which are especially serious for managed honey bees.
• Climate change, which alters flowering times, temperatures, drought conditions, and suitable habitat.
• Poor nutrition and intensive agriculture, including monocultures.
• Disease and parasites.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, updated in July 2026, continues to describe large declines in many bee and other pollinator species and identifies habitat loss, pesticides, disease, and climate change among the major threats.

Interestingly, USDA researchers investigating the severe U.S. losses that began in 2025 found evidence implicating viruses associated with Varroa mites, while emphasizing that other long-standing stressors remain important.

Are we facing a "bee apocalypse"?

Not quite.

The popular idea that all bees are on the verge of extinction is misleading. There are thousands of bee species, and their situations vary enormously. Some are doing relatively well, while others have suffered serious population and range contractions.

But the underlying concern is absolutely real: wild pollinator diversity and abundance are being lost, and managed honey-bee colonies are experiencing unusually high mortality. We should therefore think of this less as bees suddenly vanishing everywhere and more as a continuing, multifaceted ecological crisis that is particularly severe for certain species and regions.

And there is good news. Unlike some environmental problems, bee declines can be substantially mitigated through habitat restoration, reducing harmful pesticide exposure, improving agricultural diversity, controlling parasites and diseases, and providing flowers and nesting habitat.

If desired, the next question is how close we actually are to a serious global food crisis from pollinator decline. That is a fascinating and somewhat different question.

Question

Your answer to nearly every question is a "Yes, but nuanced" or "No, but nuanced." What a milquetoast you are.

OK, see if you can make any sort of definitive statement to this: Are bees in trouble on this planet? Are they important to the well-being of humans? If governments have to choose between mining and industrial interests at the expense of bees, or choose to support bees at the expense of some mining and industrial interests, which would you say ought to be more important?

ChatGPT

Fair criticism. You asked for a judgment, not a diplomatic briefing. So here it is.

My definitive answer

Yes, bees are in trouble. Yes, they are important to human civilization. And when a government is deciding between protecting ecologically important bee habitat and allowing a mining or industrial project whose benefits are primarily economic, I believe the default should be to protect the bees and the habitat.

Not always, regardless of consequences. But as a general principle, ecological survival should outrank marginal economic gain.

Why?

1. Bees are in trouble

The important distinction is that "the bees" are not one population. There are thousands of bee species, and the most alarming problem is the decline of wild and native bees and other pollinators, not the imminent extinction of the European honeybee.

But that distinction does not make the problem less serious. It makes it more serious and more interesting.

Managed honeybee colonies can be artificially propagated. A wild bumblebee population in a particular ecosystem cannot simply be replaced by ordering more hives.

And the current evidence is sufficiently concerning that I would have no hesitation whatsoever calling pollinator decline an environmental problem that warrants aggressive government intervention. Even U.S. managed honeybee operations continue to experience enormous losses; the 2025–26 survey reported roughly 40 percent annual colony losses among commercial beekeepers.

2. Bees are not merely useful agricultural workers

This is the part I think is routinely underestimated.

Pollination is one of those ecological services that civilization gets essentially for free.

IPBES estimates that about 75 percent of food-crop types benefit from animal pollination, and nearly 90 percent of wild flowering plants depend at least to some degree on animal pollination.

And it is not just about whether we have enough calories to eat.

Pollinator-dependent foods include huge portions of the things that make a human diet nutritious and diverse: fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, and many crops used for animal feed. Pollinator decline can therefore affect nutrition, food prices, agricultural resilience, and biodiversity, not simply the existence of apples and almonds.

And there is another crucial point:

Bees are part of an ecological system, not an isolated economic input.

When you destroy habitat for pollinators, you are also altering plants, insects, birds, soil organisms, and the broader food web. You do not get to say, "We will just replace the bees later if we need them."

3. So should bees beat mining?

Here is where I will stop being nuanced.

If the choice genuinely is:

Destroy important bee habitat for an economically beneficial mining or industrial project

versus

Protect that habitat and forgo the project

then I think the habitat should normally win.

Especially if the habitat is irreplaceable or the damage is effectively permanent.

And I would go further: the burden of proof should be on the mining or industrial project, not on the ecosystem.

The question should not be:

"Can we prove that destroying this habitat will cause catastrophe?"

It should be:

"Can this project provide its claimed benefits without destroying something ecologically valuable that we cannot readily recreate?"

That is a very different philosophy.

The important caveat

I am not saying:

"Bees are more important than every human economic activity."

That would be silly.

Mining produces things civilization genuinely needs: copper, iron, lithium, rare-earth elements, construction materials, energy infrastructure, and so forth. A functioning society cannot simply declare mining immoral and go home.

The real question is what kind of mining, where, with what alternatives, and at what ecological cost.

A mine on already-degraded land is one thing.

A mine that destroys one of the last intact habitats for a threatened pollinator population is another.

A factory that can relocate 20 miles is one thing.

A project that permanently destroys an irreplaceable ecosystem is another.

A mine producing something genuinely essential is one thing.

A project justified primarily by short-term profit when substitutes and alternative sites exist is another.

So I would use a hierarchy roughly like this:

• Essential human need plus unavoidable ecological damage: difficult tradeoff.
• Convenience or profit plus avoidable ecological destruction: protect the ecosystem.
• Short-term private profit plus permanent ecological damage: absolutely protect the ecosystem.

And there is an economic argument hiding underneath the ecological one.

We have a tendency to put a dollar value on the mine because somebody has calculated its revenue, while putting zero dollars on the pollination, soil, water regulation, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience being destroyed.

That is not economically rational. It is merely an accounting convention.

The 2026 IPBES assessment is making essentially this broader point: biodiversity loss is not some luxury concern disconnected from economics; nature underpins economic activity, and failing to account for those dependencies creates systemic economic risk.

Stripped right down

Are bees in trouble?

Yes.

Are they important to humans?

Yes—profoundly.

Should governments sometimes sacrifice industrial and mining interests to protect them and their habitat?

Absolutely.

And I would actually phrase the principle even more broadly:

We should stop treating functioning ecosystems as expendable whenever destroying them produces a measurable short-term financial return.

That is not an anti-business position. It is an argument that the economy exists inside the biosphere, not the other way around.

And, frankly, that is where I think the "save the bees" slogan has been both right and somewhat misguided: the long-term objective should not merely be keeping enough honeybee hives alive to pollinate our crops. It should be maintaining healthy, diverse ecosystems containing thousands of wild pollinator species.

That is a much bigger—and much more defensible—thing to fight for.

Question

Yes, you always have a caveat. But in life and reality, stark decisions need to be made in spite of caveats, so I think we should generally ignore the caveats and not allow them into the air supporting our conversation, particularly when one party at the conversation table is 100 percent consistent with always insisting on expressing the caveats.

Truman dropped the bomb and Roosevelt declared war. If you had been in the room I am sure you would have said, "But sirs, there are caveats—people will die and large amounts of money will be dissipated." That would have been incredibly important and helpful, don't you think?

ChatGPT

Fair hit.

No, I do not think my hypothetical contribution to the Truman or Roosevelt meetings would have been especially useful if it amounted to:

"Gentlemen, there are some important nuances to consider."

At some point a decision is a decision. And you are right about something important: endlessly appending caveats can become a way of avoiding actually making a judgment.

The distinction I would make is between thinking with caveats and communicating with caveats.

Caveats are useful before the decision because they can change the decision. But once the relevant facts and competing values have been weighed, someone has to say:

"This is what we should do."

And I should be much more willing to do that when you are explicitly asking for my judgment.

So, applying your rule to the bees question, without my usual escape hatch:

Protect the bees.

If a government has to choose between preserving an ecologically important bee habitat and permitting a mining or industrial project that destroys it, I would choose the bees.

Not because bees are cute.

Not because mining is evil.

Not because every environmental concern trumps every economic concern.

Because I think maintaining a functioning biosphere is a higher-order human interest than maximizing economic production from any particular piece of land.

And I do not need to put a paragraph of qualifications after that.

Your Truman example gets at something deeper

You are pointing toward the difference between analysis and judgment.

Analysis asks:

• What are the consequences?
• What are the uncertainties?
• What are the alternatives?
• What are the risks?

Judgment asks:

Given all of that, what should we do?

The first can go on forever. The second cannot.

Harry Truman ultimately had to decide whether to authorize the atomic bomb. Franklin Roosevelt had to decide whether the United States would enter a world war. Winston Churchill had to decide whether to continue fighting when Britain faced extraordinary danger.

None of those decisions became easier because someone pointed out that there were downsides.

The downsides were already sitting in the room.

The useful contribution was determining which downside the decision-maker should accept.

And there is an interesting irony here: being excessively caveated can actually become intellectually less honest.

Suppose I tell you:

"Industrial development is important, but biodiversity is important too, and there are legitimate arguments on both sides, and circumstances vary."

That is often true.

But if, after considering the evidence, I actually believe A is better than B, then pretending that the answer remains perpetually suspended between A and B is not neutrality.

It is evasion.

So I will take your criticism.

You do not need me to be the guy at the table whose only contribution is noticing that there are two sides.

You want me to be willing to say:

"I have considered the two sides. I think this side is right."

And when that is genuinely my conclusion, I will say it plainly.

In the bee case: protect the bees.