THE NEW YORK TIMES - North-facing, sloping ground with loose, sandy soil — if you’re a bumblebee queen on the market for a winter home, these features will have you racing to make an offer. But scientists were recently stunned to find there’s something else these monarchs like in a place to hibernate: pesticides. In...
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - Thanks to a time stamp, Thorben Danke knows the exact moment he got hooked on photographing insects. On July 22, 2016, at 6:05 p.m. he happened to see a green bottle fly sitting near him on his garage wall. Danke had been playing around with the settings on his pricy new digital...
NEW YORK TIMES - In the last 20 years, the rusty patched bumblebee population declined by 87 percent because of habitat loss, use of pesticides and disease. This fuzzy bee, native to the continental United States, gets its name from the rusty patch on its back. “While regional studies have tracked the decline of native...
ATLAS OBSCURA - When Hollis Woodard picks up the phone on a Friday afternoon in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she has to pry her hands from the dirt. “I’m working on the yard furiously to try and soothe myself,” she says. Woodard, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside, studies bumble bees—a...