 Hi, I'm Jenny Motter, Art Director for NASA Science. As I was looking for inspiration for the 2021 Earth Day poster, I got to thinking about how the pandemic has left a lot of us feeling isolated. During this difficult year, I found my own personal solace in nature. The great outdoors, even if it was just our little backyard, was the one place my family and I could safely escape from working and learning at home. My young son and I spent a lot of time outside, discovering new plants and insects, a whole world we may not have seen if otherwise. During this time, I also developed a love for macro photography. I took close-ups of tiny little subjects and found great joy in sharing my photographic revelations online. For me, discovering a tiny world right at my feet was an amazing experience. So how could I translate this experience into an Earth Day poster? This Earth Day we're talking about connections. One big and obvious, while others are well tiny. What a perfect opportunity to highlight how even the smallest of contributors can have a great impact. Plus, I'd never explored the perspective of the bug's eye view. So with that in mind, I brainstormed with our team and we all quickly converged on the idea of the honey bee. Honey bees are social creatures, each with a distinct role in the colony to ensure the survival of the hive. They are also very important for the global good as pollinators for many of the foods that we eat. And much like us, the honey bee is affected by the warming climate and the changes to the Earth's systems. So for this 10th in the series of Earth Day posters, the honey bee's connections to the Earth, to their hives and to our lives made them the perfect subject. But what does NASA have to do with honey bees? Quite a bit, actually, on Earth and in space. NASA scientists have tracked honey bee production and climate correlating how warming trends affect both the pollinators and the plants they feed on. Others have used our data from space and collected on the ground by citizen scientists to help beekeepers make smart decisions for their hives upkeep. These were even passengers on a space shuttle flight several years ago, and they did pretty well. The artwork for this poster was a lot of fun to make. I set out to create a realistic nature scene reminiscent of Audubon illustrations, but also found opportunities to include a few surprises. The largest of these is the North and South American continents hidden in the honeycomb. You can also see the moon in orbit in the daytime sky. And if you look closely, you'll find our beloved NASA meatball hidden in the honey drop at the base of the hive. Then there's some more of the obvious elements like the flowers that our lovely bees are pollinating, the ladybug in the snail, and another of my favorite macro photography subjects and nature's decomposer, mushrooms. As I was designing the poster, I was lucky to have Amy Crane, a fellow NASA designer and beekeeper, share her expertise on honeybees, and she gave me some great suggestions. One of them was to include a queen bee in the upper right of the hive. Can you spot the queen? She's slightly larger than a worker bee with a long abdomen and wings shorter than her body length. Amy also recommended including a bee with pollen pants. Pollen pants refers to the area on a bee's leg used to carry pollen back to the hive. Thanks, Amy. To download the 2021 Earth Day poster, along with desktop, mobile and virtual backgrounds and posters from past years, visit science.nasa.gov. slash 2021 poster. Thanks for listening and remember that we are all connected by Earth. Happy Earth Day.