The new smartphone app has been launched as a new citizen science project to observe and collect high-quality data on the abundance, diversity and activity of wild bees in Wisconsin. The program was unveiled last year by a research team led by Claudio Gratton, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Entomology, with funding from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment and Gwenyn Hill Farm.
"The project started with apple growers reaching out to the Gratton lab asking whether they need honeybees on their property, or if they could rely on wild bees instead," explains Colleen Satyshur, outreach specialist for the WiBee project. "It costs money to rent honeybee hives and there's coordination involved, so the growers wanted to figure out if they had enough wild bees around to pollinate their apples."
More than one-third of the planet's food crops depend on pollination, and bees are the most efficient pollinators in many cases. In Wisconsin, bees are essential to many of the state's fruit and vegetable crops such as cranberries, cherries, melons and squash.
The WiBee app collects bee visitation data through user surveys. Each survey takes five minutes to conduct and involves users watching bees as they visit flowers in a three-by-three foot area. Since bee behavior is highly influenced by time of day, weather or even just a single cloud passing over, large quantities of data are needed to be able to develop pollination management recommendations.
Last year, 116 app users conducted 891 surveys in total, and things are on track to at least double this amount in 2021.
For more information about the WiBee app, visit https://pollinators.wisc.edu/wibee
Categories: Wisconsin, General