In the villages along the Sundarbans fringe, in Rajshahi’s mustard fields, in Dinajpur’s lychee orchards, and all over this continent, bees were more than simple insects. They served as partners in an unspoken ecological agreement that supported crops, forests, and human life long before any government agricultural ministry was established. That assurance of co-existence is now in serious jeopardy.
Historically, bee populations including Apis dorsata (the giant rock bee), Apis cerana (the eastern honey bee), and dozens of stingless bee species, evolved alongside this delta’s extraordinary biodiversity. The floodplains and wetlands, the mixed forests and riparian corridors, offered a mosaic of flowering plants across every season. Bees didn’t just collect nectar. They played a crucial role in cross-pollination, supporting the reproduction of native plants that stabilised riverbanks, provided food for birds and mammals, and sustained moisture cycles. These processes helped make this region one of the most agriculturally productive globally. This was a relationship forged over thousands of years. And it took fewer than fifty to start dismantling it.
When the Green Revolution arrived in Bangladesh in the 1960s and accelerated through the 1970s and 80s, it brought with it high-yield variety (HYV) seeds, chemical fertilisers, and the systematic replacement of polyculture with monoculture. Rice paddies, once surrounded by mustard, lentils, grasses, and numerous flowering weeds, were transformed into uniform fields dedicated to a single crop. The logic was understandable and justified by the new logic of ‘nation-state’- feed the growing human population inside the spiked borders. The outcome was measurable: triple the rice production.
Monocultures provide bees with a two-week feast and then a dessert. Herbicides eliminate flowering edges and ungoverned strips where bees foraged. Pesticides, often misused, contaminate nectar and pollen, weakening bees’ immunity and navigation. Studies show widespread neonicotinoid use persists in Bangladeshi farmland, despite EU bans due to bee toxicity. Meanwhile, large-scale commercial plantations, eucalyptus for timber, rubber in the Chittagong Hill Tracts by the settlers, monoculture shrimp farming (fed by the NGOs), displacing coastal mangroves, further eroded the ecological corridors that bee populations depend on for survival across seasons.
Urbanisation worsened the agricultural impact. Dhaka has rapidly consumed its green outskirts, leaving little ecological space. Wetlands near the historic capital, once vital pollinator habitats, have been drained and developed. What remains of urban greenery is often ornamental: plants chosen for appearance rather than ecological function, trimmed into shapes that do not flower, sprayed with pesticides to remain ‘neat’. Bees cannot live in a city that has forgotten how to be untidy.
And yet, even this familiar degradation is being compounded by something that rarely appears in conversations about bees. The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence, its data centres, its server farms, and its unrelenting hunger for electricity are quietly worsening the conditions that pollinators are already struggling against. A single AI query consumes more energy than a conventional web search. Data centres currently account for roughly 1-2% of global electricity use, a share that is climbing with each new model released. In Bangladesh, where electricity still depends heavily on coal and gas, this demand translates directly into emissions. Those emissions shape monsoon patterns, push temperatures beyond what bee colonies have adapted to, and disturb the precise synchrony between flowering seasons and foraging windows that bee populations depend on to survive.
This is the context in which Bangladesh’s intellectual class has chosen, almost uniformly, to celebrate artificial intelligence. In universities and newspaper columns, educators, administrators, and businessmen are urging Bangladesh to integrate AI into classrooms, prepare its youth for the AI economy, and adopt Silicon Valley’s tools as readily as a new textbook. Many might be well-intentioned. They are also, for the most part, untroubled by what they are not saying.
Promoting AI adoption without a word about its water consumption, energy appetite, or its contribution to emissions is not progress toward reshaping Bangladesh’s climate. It is the particular irresponsibility of people who know better, dressing institutional convenience as vision.
Bangladesh accounts for less than 0.5% of global emissions, yet it ranks among the countries most exposed to the consequences. Forty percent of its workforce is in agriculture. Its coastal communities are living at the edge of what the climate will allow. These are not statistics that exist separately from the question of AI infrastructure. They are precisely the reason that the question must be asked here, and asked honestly.
The bees do not care about quarterly growth projections from the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, or Nation-states. They respond to the air’s actual temperature and the soil’s actual toxicity. They are, in this sense, the most honest economists we have. This is not a call to reject modernity or to return to some imagined agrarian past. It is a call for proportion and for honesty.
Bangladesh needs pollinators. Without bees and other pollinators, the country’s vegetable and fruit production, worth billions of takas annually, faces a serious biological risk. The Sundarbans, already under pressure from salinity and deforestation, depends on pollination to regenerate its extraordinary eco-sphere. These are not abstractions.
What is needed is political willingness to regulate pesticide use, restore ecological corridors, reintroduce native plants at field edges and roadsides, and develop urban green spaces that are functional, not just decorative.
The writer is a researcher and anthropologist
