In a room tucked behind a scientific laboratory at the University of Colorado Boulder are aisles and aisles of tall gray storage cabinets. Adrian Carper opens one of the metal doors and slides out a wooden tray with a glass lid.
Inside are dead bees, more than 200 of them, each one suspended in space under a tiny metal pin. Beneath each winged insect are minuscule slips of sepia-toned paper providing details about the specimen — where and when it was collected, and by whom.
Carper points to one bee: Megachile melanophaea, leaf-cutter bee, known for the giant blades on its teeth.
“You can see it was collected from the Science Lodge, West Boulder, Colorado, June 21, 1940, by Anne Lutz,” Carper explains.
Nearly 200,000 bees, collected over the past 120 years, are housed in these cabinets. There are fuzzy bumble bees the size of pennies, metallic blue and green bees and yellow-and-black striped sweat bees. Together, they tell an important ecological story of the vital pollinators.
Several Mountain West states are home to some of the highest levels of bee diversity in the U.S. In Colorado alone, there are 946 known species. Yet many wild bees are in decline due to increased development, pesticide use and climate change.
To understand how bird or mammal populations are faring, conservationists count them. But insects cover vast areas with such abundance and diversity. Instead, scientists track where species exist in space and time. For that, museums are an invaluable resource.
“What’s the biggest source of our data? It's here in our natural history collections, and on those pins,” Carper said.
The problem, however, is that the data for more than half of the specimens in this collection is dispersed on hundreds of thousands of tiny pieces of paper. Carper wants to get the information off the paper and into the hands of scientists who can analyze it.
That’s why he’s part of a project called the Big Bee Bonanza to digitize CU Boulder’s bee collections — and several more across the country — working alongside scientists at other campuses, including the University of Nevada Reno and Arizona State University.
“If we get that data and we can rebuild those distributions, we can look to see how they're changing through time, which could inform something so basic as whether we should be concerned they're declining” he said.
Digitizing the collections could answer important questions like whether certain species are still buzzing in the same places they once were, or if their bodies have changed over time in response to stressors like climate change.
The team has already photographed the bees and their labels. Now, they’re relying on volunteers to type up all of that information.
Maggie Jacobs is one of the dedicated volunteers. From her house in San Francisco, she logs onto a web platform called Notes from Nature. Up pops a zoomed-in photo of a bee from the Boulder collection.
“Let's do the mining bees; I love the mining bees,” she said.
Next to the photo are the specimen’s notes. Jacobs fills in details like the county, elevation and scientific name. Some of the handwriting is hard-to-read cursive. Jacobs is a retired software engineer, not a biologist, but she feels her transcriptions are making a significant contribution to science.
“If someone says, for instance, ‘I want to research the bees from Larimer County,’ they can find it now,” she said.
Notes from Nature shows the same bee to three different people to cross-check the data. So far, volunteers have transcribed about 80,000 bee records.
But there’s much more to be done. Around the world, museums hold about one billion specimens — plants, mammals, fish and more — in drawers and jars, stored in museum backrooms. They include bugs from a rainforest that no longer exists and birds now extinct.
“We have all these incredible objects that were once alive on planet Earth, and that now are gone. And the only evidence of their existence is the specimens in the museums,” said Kirk Johnson, the director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, who was formerly a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
However, most museum collections are not yet digitized, Johnson said. “It’s one of the last great dark data pools.”
Digitizing collections can be challenging and expensive. Photographing, scanning and transcribing five million sheets of pressed plants at the Smithsonian, for example, took about five years and cost $7 million.
Natalie Cooper, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London, said many museums are somewhere in the process of digitizing their collections, though progress varies. Some institutions are focused on transcribing basic details — like the notes describing the bees — while others have already done that and are going back to their specimens to collect genomic data and take 3D scans.
“We've only fairly recently started developing technologies that make that easier,” Cooper said.
But, she adds, there’s a greater push to digitize collections now because scientists are racing to understand biodiversity loss and the impacts of climate change.
“There's so many things all coming together that are threatening the planet that we really need to have that data available for people to work with,” she said.
The more specimens that are digitized, she said, the more scientists will be able to use the data to answer critical questions about the past and the future.
If you would like to volunteer as a citizen scientist to digitize bee specimen data, visit CU Boulder's Big Bee Bonanza project.
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.
