We’d be completely fucked. Completely. Utterly. Compete devastation of the human race, no questions about it. Period.

Famed biology E.O. Wilson once estimated that the number of insects on earth is around ten quintillion. Ten quintillion. That’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 insects. That’s 1.4 billion insects per human being on Earth.

Let’s see how the average person would fare against just two of what would probably be the “soldier species” of the insect Armageddon.

ANTS:

Siafu, for example, have been known to climb inside of animals via their noses, walk down into their lungs and chew on their respiratory tissues. This essentially suffocates the animal from the inside.

Imagine you’re being covered in them while you sleep. You swat a thousand off your chest. A few crawl on your body, clinging among your hairs. While you’re busy killing those ants, a thousand more have already begun to scale you while the others you missed inject you with a formic acid laced bite.

Imagine troops with no hesitation. An army that can utilize a single food source without losing morale. An army that would gladly sacrifice itself.

Sure, we’d kill millions or billions of them, but so what? They’re still coming. They don’t sleep like we do. We sleep for hours, ants sleep for a minute at a time throughout the day in shifts. To us, the colony would never seem to sleep, it would be an endless barrage.

BEES:

Here’s a little description I wrote of what it would be like to attacked by bees while you’re just innocently on the toilet, pooping away at your careless human poops.

You’re sitting on the toilet, flipping through your phone. You open the Facebook app and mindlessly scroll through people’s photos. You ‘like’ a status. You keep flipping until you hear the crack in the ceiling.

You look up.

It’s too late.

A stream of honeybees pours in through the ceiling as you attempt to pull your pants up. You waste precious seconds trying to clean yourself. It doesn’t matter, the bees land right on you.

The first dozen do not sting, but suddenly one does. The female workers push themselves into your skin, the stingers on their abdomens pushing deep and lodging themselves in with barbs. The modified ovipositors push in the apitoxin, a cocktail of enzymes and chemicals.

You’re not allergic to bees, but it doesn’t matter. As the first bee pulls itself out, essentially disemboweling itself, the stinger portion of the body continues to work, pumping venom into you continuously, but that’s not the worst part: the pheromones are released.

The pheromones from the first dozen stings reach into the air where the rest of the colony is waiting precipitously on the break in the ceiling, now heavy with honey and broken hive. The pheromones tell the colony to defend, and that the attacker is at the source of the pheromones. You. The unwitting offender.

You stumble backwards, pants around your ankles as you try to bat the bees off of you. You kill twenty or thirty with a slap, but more swarm around your face, stinging your eyelids which you clamp shut in fear. Some bees have crawled into your nasal passages where they sting you from the inside. You open your mouth, half to breathe and half to scream, but bees fly inside, stinging away at the roof of your mouth.

You chew and spit out the bees, releasing more pheromones, drawing more bees to you. You’re covered in thousands of bees now, the stings now numbed from the amount of apitoxin coursing through your system. Your immune system is in overdrive. Your blood is so thin, and the venom has caused your blood pressure to drop desperately low. You try to reach your phone, but it clatters away on the tile floor, unable to be grasped by your swollen fingers.

Your heart is beating faster to try to keep up, you’re in shock. You’re panicking.

Then the colony falls. The splitting crack coming from the ceiling, heavy with hundreds of pounds of honey is deafening to everyone but you. You’re deaf to the world now. Only the sound of buzzing remains. Thousands of wings beating against your eardrums which sounds so distant as your ears swell shut from the stings.

You fall down and writhe in the mass of honey on the ground. Your shirt is cloying, caked in the sticky honey.

The bees climb inside, relentlessly stinging as the world falls away.

Now that’s just two types of insects.

We’re letting spiders off the hook because they’re not insects, but it doesn’t even matter. Imagine, instead, thousands of caterpillars weaving silk webs around your house, tripping you up, insects purposefully infiltrating our food supplies, rotting our food intentionally, spreading disease through every kitchen and foodstore on the globe.

We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. Every single insect that is poisonous or venomous can come into play. Bombardier beetles spraying boiling chemicals in your face. Lice, chiggers, myiasis. Botflies being seeded into your skin when you stepped outside. Chagas disease being intentionally spread to every person who fall asleep without safeguarding their home. Ticks seeding our children with Lyme disease. Malaria spreading through the globe as an intentional plot by mosquitoes. West Nile Virus easily transmitted to every human who ventures out at the wrong time.

We wouldn’t even be able to fight back. All of our crops and livelihood depend on insect pollination of plants. Without that, we’d be limited to wind pollinated crops, all of which will be consumed strategically by the insects to starve us out. We need whole pieces of food, but insects? They can survive on bits of detritus in the soil, or by consuming one another, or by eating vegetation that we have no ability to digest. We would be demoralized immediately. Crushed under a thousand millipede feet. You want a vision of the future? Imagine a billion tiny legs stomping on a human face: forever.

It would be absolute madness.

Humanity’s only chance would be to escape to the coldest, driest regions of the globe and hope to have enough resources to keep their population afloat.