"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle" Albert Einstein wrote, and if we take the former path then it allows us to see the wonder in the most common of animals. It can also help us appreciate how bound we are with other animals in the ecosystem, and according to another (more apocalyptic) quote attributed to Albert Einstein (although there is no proof he actually said it): “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years left to live.” Bees pollinate around a third of everything we eat and play an essential role in sustaining the planet’s ecosystems. Almost 90% of the crops grown for human consumption need bees and other insects to pollinate them.
Here a a Bee (Apis mellifera) poses in the natural symmetry of a lotus flower in my garden. Did you know the honey bee needs an internal body temperature of 35 degrees to fly.
This picture was taken during daylight, on the Peak in Hong Kong, using a ring-flash to fill in the darker shadows that flowers often have during the day.
UPDATE:
The bees have been declared the most important living beings on this planet, the Earthwatch Institute concluded in the last meeting of the Royal Geographical Society of London.
“The recent studies show a dramatic decline of the bees' number as almost 90 percent of the bee population has disappeared in the last few years. The uncontrolled use of pesticides, deforestation or lack of flowers are the main reasons for their extinction. . However, why would such a little being be named the most important creature on Earth? Well, the answer is actually more simple than you ever thought. Seventy percent of the world's agriculture depends exclusively on bees. Needless to mention the pollination is the bees' job, although the plants would not be able to reproduce, therefore the fauna would have been gone in a very short time. More than that, a study conducted by the Apiculture Entrepreneurship Center of the Universidad Mayor (CeapiMayor) and the Apiculture Corporation of Chile (Cach) with the support of the Foundation for Agrarian Innovation (FIA) concluded that the bees are the only living being who does not carry any type of pathogen.”