It feels like walking on a very thick
wet sponge. In the right time of year
what it sounds like is mosquitoes. You
hear this constant high-pitched whine of
several hundred mosquitoes circling your
head. There's a lot of big wildlife
including moose, caribou, musk ox, black
bears, brown bears, and wolves.
We've come to Alaska to look for Arctic bumblebees.
We had a team of specialists: someone from
biology, someone from botany, another
person from entomology. And starting out
we left Fairbanks and drove on pretty
developed road but as we got into the
Brooks Range the road becomes less well
paved.
The Dalton highway was built in the in
the 70s for semi trucks hauling Freight
up to the oil field. It's a dirt road for
over most of its length. The road climbs
about 4,000 feet in a pretty short
distance and it's very steep with a lot
of curves. Some sections there's a
guardrail, some sections there's not.
Anything other than perfect conditions
and you really have to be careful.
The first few days of the trip we were
camping out. We stayed out in these
pretty rustic, open campgrounds.
Growing up in Alaska, one of the things that
I got used to is the full, 24 hours a day
of sunlight. The constant daylight makes
you feel like you have a lot of energy. I
had a lot of trouble sleeping. It takes
some acclimation to get used to life in
a place where the Sun doesn't actually
ever set. Four or five days later we
arrived at Toolik field station. They had
beds to sleep in, sauna, showers. Arriving
at Toolik was definitely a bit of a
relief after a few days on the road.
We would drive until we would see a
patch of flowers. We'd stop grab our nets
and then go see if we could collect
different bee species. I was starting to
feel a little bit nervous because we've
been collecting a lot of bumblebees and
we weren't finding the species that I
really wanted to find. Bombus Polaris is
the only pollinating bee that lives in
the High Arctic. It's bigger, it's fuzzier.
Tends to have a pale orange color. It's
able to warm its body temperature higher
than other bumblebees. And that lets it
live in a place that almost no other
insects can live. They're dealing with the
most rapidly changing climatic
conditions. This place is warming faster
than anywhere else on earth, and so we
need to understand how this bee has
evolved to live in the Arctic and then
we need to understand how that
relationship might be threatened by
climate change.
We finally found our first specimen of
Polaris on July 4th. I felt very excited
because this is a bee that we've been
looking for, for more than a week.
No one's done any extensive work on the
function of this bee in the Arctic. We'll
be studying the DNA of these bumblebees
and we want to understand how these
bumblebee populations are being impacted
by climate change. This work is going to
help us understand how we can conserve
biodiversity, and in particular the
pollinators that help us produce most of
the food that we eat. So this research is
helping us keep the promise of advancing
food security in the world.
