Plants Whisper to Pollinators. We Drown Them in Pesticides

If you thought plants were passive bystanders waiting for bees to show up, think again. They respond to the specific buzzing of their favourite pollinators by pumping out more sugar. Snapdragon flowers, for example, will sweeten their nectar when they detect the wingbeat of a snail-shell bee. Evolution, as usual, favours the efficient.

This isn’t some niche botanical footnote. It’s a glimpse into the intricate acoustic dialogue between plants and pollinators, a finely-tuned system developed over millions of years. Plants don’t just rely on scent and colour; they 'listen' for the right pollinators and reward them. The fidelity of these relationships is so precise that even the gene expression of a flower can change depending on who’s buzzing nearby.

But while flowers are tuning themselves to the needs of pollinators, humans are stealing what they’re offering.

Bees don’t make honey for humans. They make it for themselves, to survive the winter, to feed their colony, to live. Commercial beekeeping rips that resource away and replaces it with sugar water. And while we’re told this is harmless, the science says otherwise: sugar lacks the micronutrients, enzymes, and antimicrobial properties of honey.

Worse still, commercial beekeeping isn’t just theft, it’s sabotage. Wild pollinators, like bumblebees and solitary bees, are far more effective pollinators than honeybees. Yet they’re being edged out by managed hives that compete for food, spread disease, and dominate ecosystems that once supported thousands of diverse pollinating species.

There are over 20,000 species of bees. Only one is farmed for honey. And that one is helping to wipe out the rest.

In this collapsing system, even flowers are changing. Some are becoming less generous, evolving to self-fertilise, shrinking in size, producing less nectar, or producing none at all. As pollinators vanish from landscapes poisoned by herbicides like dicamba, flowers are giving up on the whole deal. The result? Weaker ecosystems. And a feedback loop of decline.

Even the plants that do keep producing nectar aren’t always being truthful. Some trick pollinators into showing up with promises of sugar they never intend to deliver. Floral honesty is partly genetic, and evolution is now selecting for cheats. It’s a botanical arms race where everyone’s just trying to survive, because the humans made it hell.

Want to know how much damage one puff of herbicide can do? Just ask the milkweed at the edge of a field. A single exposure to dicamba at 1% concentration can warp plant growth, delay flowering, and repel pollinators altogether. That means fewer bees, fewer flowers, and fewer seeds.

And what’s it all for? To protect crops destined to feed livestock.

The irony is thick: we destroy wildflower meadows to grow monocultures for animals we’ll kill, and in doing so, wipe out the pollinators that keep the entire food web functioning.

Some people still cling to the delusion that eating honey somehow helps bees. That’s like saying buying ivory helps elephants. It’s exploitation dressed as environmentalism.

Honey production reduces genetic diversity through selective breeding, contributes to wild pollinator decline, and turns sentient, problem-solving animals into machines. It’s not just about food, it’s about control, commodification, and disposability. Bees are drugged, artificially inseminated, clipped, and culled.

If we genuinely want to help pollinators, the solution is simple: stop stealing from them. Let bees keep their honey. Let fields keep their weeds.

Instead of exploiting bees, we could be supporting them:

🌸 Grow native, pesticide-free flowers.

🌸 Protect wild spaces.

🌸 Avoid herbicides that drift like second-hand smoke through ecosystems.

🌸 Reject the farming systems that treat animals as units and pollinators as tools.

🌸 Choose sweeteners that don’t cost someone else their freedom.

Plant-pollinator coevolution is one of the most beautiful collaborations in nature. But it’s being unravelled by a species too entitled to see itself as the problem.

Be vegan. For the bees. For the flowers. For the world they built together.