Adding detailed information to our project~
What a great idea! garychang, has found our Western Bumble bee and he added a sound bite to his observation.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/219467739
There are other ways to add details to our data for the Washington Native Bee Society project.
THE MOST IMPORTANT WAY TO HELP IS
PLEASE DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY "AGREE"
WHEN SOMEONE IDS YOUR BEES.
It is not a "like" as for other social media. We are doing science and we want to make our WanBS project the best and most accurate data available. If you do not know what makes a bee a bee or part of a particular family, genus, or especially species, please have patience and wait for people that know more to add the identifications. If you are new "Bees" is a great place to start. That will get your observation into the project pool where the people that work on IDs will find it and can place it where it belongs. Otherwise put it into the level you know comfortably and it will move forward if and when someone can spot the characters that make it a particular kind of bee.
We cannot thank people enough for the work they put into identifying Washington's wild bees. As of today we have had 1207 people identify our bees. If you look in the project and click on identifiers you can see just how many visits these people have made to get our bees to family, genus and even many species (current count over 200).
We have drawn the attention of bee experts outside our area too. johnascher has named 13,077 bees for us, but he has also named 1,458,667 bees worldwide, which is an astounding number. A lot of those are just getting Apis mellifera out of the way, so please name honey bees whenever you find them in iNaturalist and we can help him use his time on the really interesting bee species. If you love and know Western honey bees you could identify them all over the western hemisphere and really have an impact.
Other experts from outside the PNW have come to help us too. A special note of thanks goes to tonuferko for finding species of note in the Epeolus and Triepeolus groups. A huge thank you to neylon, morcutt, domingozungri, trevorsless, bdagley, xianzx, hellabeenerd, hymenopterahumes, hadel, makarii_loskutov, susanna_h, giantcicada, zportman, and more for all the hours you have spent working on bees and for visiting our Washington bees in particular. Many of these people are professionals in the bee world and some are really good amateur scientists. We cannot thank you enough for making our project better all the time.
In the PNW we have many people working on bee identification. Thanks to the teaching of our taxonomists, Lincoln Best or beesofcanada, and karen_wright we are learning more all the time. Our current top 20 include: rainhead, wenatcheeb, beespeaker, la4bonte, rustybee, augustjackson, sprcrkwild, nmdg, bobmcd, beesearch_will, a_hershey, and brianalindh. Some of us have joined the Wa Bee Atlas project (WaBA) to learn even more. Oregon Bee Atlas, NBSBC Bee Tracker, and Bees of Southwestern Idaho are other PNW bee projects and have lent us some of their experts, thanks all!
Please connect our bees to their floral resources--Under Observation Fields click or type in: Associated species with names lookup. Type in the name of the flowers you know, or the type of flowers such as Lupines or Asters, or the plant family it is in such as Brassicaceae or Mustard family, and if all you know is that it is flowering, "Flowering plant" will do the trick. This particular field is set up so others can come along and fix the name later.
Ways anyone can help, without knowing much at all about bees or flowers is by adding to Annotations. Look in the right column and check these on your own and also anybody elses observations.
Alive or Dead: Most bees are alive in our flowers, but if found dead on the ground, in a crab spider's claws, or on a pin, please indicate that.
Evidence of Presence: Organism
Life Stage: Adult (unless you found an open nest and can see Larva)
Sex: Females have 6 abdominal segments, 12 sections on their antennae, and usually scopa to carry pollen (hairy legs on most, under the abdomen on all Megachilidae, pollen basket on honey bees and bumble bees in the NW).
Males have 7 observable abdominal segments, 13 antennal segments, and may have pollen scattered on them but do not have any specific pollen carrying adaptations.
Unfortunately there isn't yet a way to say "both" for mating bees.*
Other details we can add to our flowers:
Plant Phenology: Chose more than one if applicable--Flower Budding, Flowering, Fruiting (making seeds too),
No Evidence of Flowering (bees sitting on leaves might use this one).
Sex: Choices for Cannot be Determined, Female, Male - if you know it has male and female flowers.
*Because we cannot say there are both male and female bees interacting, you can add that detail using these two projects:
-Mating Bees
-Mating behavior
There are more projects just for bee behaviors that are also useful. Start with typing the name into the projects box. If that does not work you may have to join a particular project and/or it may require you to add each observation manually. Go to the project page to read about their particular focus or rules.
-Bees conentrating Nectar
-Bees with mites
-Ground Nesting Bees (you can gather dirt and do more data entry for this one)
-Megachile bee leaf cuts (add petal cuts too)
-Pollinator Associations
-Queen Quest
-Sleepy bee slumber parties
For other creatures on flowers:
-Arthropod-Flower Associations
Thank you everyone from those of us that only post photos, to those that focus on identification, and anything inbetween. It is amazing that our project has grown from about 2000 bees to 39,283 observations in just 3 years.
