Our modern society, so advanced and impressive, is brittle. We rely on a thousand separate systems of increasing complexity and specialization to function smoothly, every day, rarely thinking about what those systems do or what happens when they fail.

One of the more obscure systems that we rely on, in this case for the proper functioning of the agricultural industry, is beekeeping for the pollination of crops. Bees are responsible for $14 billion of agricultural activity a year, pollinating everything from almonds to avocados. In fact, bees don’t earn their keep through honey any more – China and Argentina undercut domestic honey in price, leaving pollination as the big money maker. Though alternatives to bees have been sought for pollination, nothing has really emerged that works quite as well.

So what happens when the bees all die? The NY Times has an article about a bee crisis that has stricken the nation. Entire bee colonies are simply disappearing, and bee keepers are reporting losses from 40-70%.

Initial signs appear to point to overly selective breeding of the bees, resulting in bee strains that aren’t tolerant of the stresses placed on them. This should be a relatively easy problem to fix, given time – finding ways to stress the bees less or breeding better stock is certainly conceivable but won’t happen over night.

So bees are disappearing and it might be because they’ve been bred into such a specialized role that they no longer have the healthy robustness that comes from millions of years of natural selection. This selective breeding program has then, in its failure, threatened agriculture, itself affecting what you and I are able to put on our tables, and for how much.

Is this a surprising outcome to large-scale specialization and over-utilization of an important resource? What other fundamental resources and systems will drag down our economy and our society in their collapse? How many smaller scale systems need to fail before the larger system is destroyed?