ALASKAN BUMBLEBEE FLYING AMONG THE CATNIP FLOWERS

One of the challenges I enjoy is trying to photograph bees in flight. Needless to say it involves taking a lot of fuzzy pictures for the few that turn out reasonably sharp. Thank goodness for the rise of digital photography. In the old days trying something like this using film would have cost a fortune.
Every year the catnip flowers on the berm in front of our Anchorage house are visited in numbers by a couple of rather petit species of bumblebee. The flowers have been in bloom for a few weeks and I was beginning to think the bees were not coming back. Bees have been in decline worldwide for more than a decade because of several causes that are not yet fully understood. One of the primary factors has been the widespread use of neonicotinoids in pesticides. They work by binding to a particular type of receptor in the brains of insects, causing paralysis and death. Unfortunately, such receptors are abundant in bees.
The European Union banned most neonicotinoids for use on flowering crops and spring sown crops beginning in 2013. While the US continues to approve the use of most neonicotinoids with the exception of sulfoxaflor, on January 1 of this year Maryland became the first state to ban the sale of pesticide products containing neonicotinoids generally. It is worth noting that about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants with bees accounting for about 80 percent of that pollination.
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