I really like summer! A lot of flowers are in bloom and they attract a lot of flying insects.
As you might know flying insects like bees play a crucial role in the pollination of flowers. By flying from flower to flower they bring pollen from male to female flowers which then can fertilize and grow seeds or fruits.

Unfortunately the bees aren't doing well. At least here in The Netherlands.
This has a couple of reasons;

1. The use of pesticides
   A lot of farmers use a lot of pesticides to protect their crops. But this doesn't only affects the crops, but also the flowers on and around the farmland en gets into the ground water.

2. Petrification
   We use the translation of petrification to describe the fact that we as humans are replacing nature with stones. Houses, roads, pavements, but also back and front yards are often completely paved. Move stone is less flowers and also no place to create a home (a lot of bees live underground).

3. Mowing
   Lawns in the villages and cities need to look nice and get mown very often (at least they used to do that over here). This gives wild flowers no chance to grow and these are an important source of food for bees.

4. Hornets
   The latest threat to bees is the Asian Hornet that finds it's way to our country. Hornets can kill complete bee colonies.

Luckily there are a lot of initiatives to help the bees. People are asked to report if they see Asian Hornets so they can be removed. Municipalities have introduced initiatives as the "No Mowing May" where they stop mowing the lawns for a complete month and even after that month don't mow everything. This way the wild flowers have a chance to grow.
People are also incentivized to have more plants in their yards by the campaign; Tile out, plant in! And they also promote wild flower mix and insect hotels.

I think we're doing quite a good job. About 50% of my backyard is unpaved. I have a lot of flowering plants, seeded wild flower mix on some places and recently received an insect hotel for fathers day.

And the results of my efforts are noticeable; I have a lot of (bumble)bees visiting my backyard.
One of my best bee magnets are the so-called Oxeyes. A beautiful large plant that grows large yellow flowers. It not only attracts bees, but also other flying insects like hoverflies.
Somehow I haven't seen a lot of butterflies this year yet.

Because the flowers are quite big the bees tend to stay a bit longer on the flower which makes it a bit easier to photograph them.

Here you see a bumblebee on one of the Oxeye flowers. There are quite a lot of different species of bumblebees. They are all hairy. Most of them are orange/yellow and black, but this one also has a white backend. The yellow things on its hind legs are 'baskets' where the bumblebee stores the pollen it collects.

I hope you enjoyed reading this blog.

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FriendlyMoose

Creating blogs about photography, cycling, gardening, craft beer and more...

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Every week I create a post with an overview of all the photography contests on Hive. You can find the weekly overview post by checking the #photocontests tag.
I also organise a weekly photography contest myself; the POB Photocontest. This weekly contests has a new subject every week and you can win POB tokens and Ecency points.
Check out the posts with the #pobphotocontest tag.

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