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Bees and other pollinators are increasingly under threat from human activities. To raise awareness of the importance of pollinators and their contribution to sustainable development, the UN marks May 20 as World Bee Day. This year, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) examines how a decades-old legacy of DDT use has imperilled Tajikistan’s bees and the actions being taken to reverse this trend.

From the 1970s to the early 1990s, Daria Babenkova’s family was one of many in Tajikistan who relied on bees for their livelihood – shipping their hives across the country’s mountains and prairies as they sought out the flower meadows that would yield the finest honey.

“Relying solely on honey production did not guarantee a secure income so my family began taking on pollination jobs as they travelled,” Daria says. “Farmers would pay them to camp around their fields for a few days at a time so the bees would pollinate their crops.”

But the family’s new addition to their business soon revealed a hidden cost, as bees from one colony after another began to die off after visiting new farms.

“Although the farmers tried assuring my grandfather that they didn’t use dangerous chemicals on their fields, the legacy of more than two decades of DDT use had left a very evident imprint on the local environment,” Daria, now a United Nations Volunteer supporting UNEP’s Chemicals & Waste team, says.