A variant — "Professor Einstein, the learned scientist, once calculated that if all bees disappeared off the earth, four years later all humans would also have disappeared" — appears in The Irish Beekeeper, v.19-20, 1965-66, p74, citing Abeilles et Fleurs (Bees and Flowers, the house magazine of Union Nationale de l'Apiculture Française) for June 1965. Snopes.com mentions its use in a beekeepers' protest in 1994 in Europe http://www.snopes.com/quotes/einstein/bees.asp suggesting invention and attribution to Einstein for political reasons.
Misattributed
“If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.”
Source: The Life of the Bee
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Maurice Maeterlinck 21
Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist 1862–1949Related quotes
“Love is the only shocking act left on the face of the earth.”
Source: First line from her autobiography, Love, Love and Love (June 1993)
On completing a long novel, New York Times (7 April 1968)
To Leon Goldensohn, February 12, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004
Source: What On Earth Is About To Happen… For Heaven’s Sake? (2013), p. 39
Session 918, Page 368
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume Two (1986)
In page=106
Science and National Consciousness in Bengal: 1870-1930