Within aisles of cabinets at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum of Natural History collections are rows upon rows of wooden display boxes with glass tops. Each box holds dozens to hundreds of bee specimens.
Leafcutter bees with blades on their teeth. Round-bodied Western bumblebees. Metallic green sweat bees.
Details about each specimen, like the species name, who found it, where and when, are pinned down under each bee. Put together, it’s a treasure trove of data about the crucial pollinators. The problem is that it’s analog, on tiny slips of paper, sometimes handwritten in cursive.
Now, scientists are pushing to get that information out of the museum cabinets and onto computers. That’s because there’s currently a lack of information about populations of many bee species.
“If we get that data, and we can rebuild those distributions, we can look for how they're changing over time which could inform something so basic as whether or not we should be concerned that they're declining,” said Adrian Carper, an entomology curator at the museum.
To digitize their bee collections, researchers at 13 institutions, including CU Boulder, the University of Nevada, Reno, and Arizona State University, formed the “Big Bee Bonanza.”
Volunteer citizen scientists can visit an online platform called Notes from Nature, which gives visitors specimens to transcribe. In dropdown menus and text boxes, the platform asks you to write down the words on labels next to zoomed-in images of bees.
For example, the note by one mining bee says it was collected near Carbondale, Colo., in 1982. When you’re done with one bee, Notes from Nature prompts you to enter data for another one, like a computer game.
“I find myself having to set alarms because I can't ever stop doing this —- it's so much fun,” said Virginia Scott, the collections manager.
The team at CU Boulder is hoping to get notes from 50,000 bee specimens transcribed by 2025.
“Participating in this project is one of the biggest ways you can help in bee conservation because it gets that data to the conservationists who need it,” Carver said.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
