Did Einstein say: “If bees disappear from the face of the Earth, humanity will have four years left”?

This gloomy prediction from Einstein is very popular on the Internet. We decided to check the correctness of the attribution of this quote.

A quote about the death of humanity after the disappearance of bees, attributed to Albert Einstein, has been circulating on the Internet for decades. It pops up not only in public pages in “VKontakte» And LiveJournal, but also in media publications, for example "Rossiyskaya Gazeta", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", Newsru.com, "Knife" etc. In 2013, the quote even appeared in a press release from the French Ministry of Agriculture (the page has now been deleted).

There is not a single, more or less reliable evidence that Einstein ever said anything like that. Search by largest archive Albert Einstein's work at the University of Jerusalem, to which the scientist bequeathed all his notes after his death, did not produce results. IN collection quotes from Einstein, published by Princeton University, this phrase is located in the section “Attributed to Einstein.” The compiler suggests that perhaps someone distorted one of the physicist’s real quotes beyond recognition.

The authoritative fact-checking project Snopes also asked I wondered if Einstein had said anything similar, and discovered that the first time this quote, attributed to the physicist, appeared in the news about protests by Brussels beekeepers in 1994. After studying Einstein's works, collections of quotes and archives, fact checkers came to the conclusion that he never said anything like that.

The Quote Investigator project, dedicated to checking the correctness of quote attribution, found an even earlier case of a quote attributed to Einstein about the disappearance of bees and then humanity. In 1965, the French magazine La vie des bêtes et l'ami des bêtes published an article about the environmental harm of mosquito control, where the author cited that same quote to support his words. However, Quote Investigator also found no reliable evidence that Einstein ever said anything like that.

The authors of Snopes and Quote Investigator believe that this is most likely the case when an idea is put into the mouth of a respected person in order to attract public attention to it.

Incorrect quote attribution

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on topic:

1. Did Einstein say: “Only two things are infinite: the Universe and human stupidity. But I'm not sure about the first one"?
2. Is it true that the phrase that in the fourth world war people will fight with stones and sticks belongs to Einstein?