Photos: Toke Thomas Høye
If
something isn’t working between the flowers and the bees, there is a problem. Every child knows that. And it isn’t working properly in the Arctic.
A big job with counting For the past 14 years, a research team has been following the flowering and the number of insects in a region near the Zackenberg Research Station in North-East Greenland. Every summer, they have kept a meticulous track of how many plants there were in a number of plant fields and how many insects that had fallen into the buried traps. A monotonous and simple counting job that has provided a tremendous amount of data - about 150,000 insects - which has now made it possible to make a scientific analysis of the relationship between the flowers and the pollinating insects in an Arctic area.