  The production cross section of electrons from semileptonic decays of beauty
hadrons was measured at mid-rapidity (|y| < 0.8) in the transverse momentum
range $1 < p_{\rm T} < 8$ Gev/$c$ with the ALICE experiment at the CERN LHC in
pp collisions at a center of mass energy $\sqrt{s} = 7$ TeV using an integrated
luminosity of 2.2 nb$^{-1}$. Electrons from beauty hadron decays were selected
based on the displacement of the decay vertex from the collision vertex. A
perturbative QCD calculation agrees with the measurement within uncertainties.
The data were extrapolated to the full phase space to determine the total cross
section for the production of beauty quark-antiquark pairs.
