The Bees' Needs: the costs and benefits of being popular

The Bees’ Needs (http://beesneeds.colorado.edu), is a field-based research project that is focused in the Northern Front Range region of Colorado. This area is home to over 500 native bee species, one of the most diverse... [ view full abstract ]

The Bees’ Needs (http://beesneeds.colorado.edu), is a field-based research project that is focused in the Northern Front Range region of Colorado. This area is home to over 500 native bee species, one of the most diverse regions in North America. In 2014 we recruited ~250 volunteers and in 2015 this grew to ~500 participants who have helped us address very explicit research questions—how do landscape attributes and land management practices influence native solitary bee and wasp diversity and abundance? To answer these questions we provide volunteers with native bee nesting sites (“bee blocks”) on which they collect data every other week throughout the summer months. This project openly seeks to educate and engage volunteers around scientific literacy and conservation biology of native insects. With two field seasons of data, we are starting to make some interesting scientific discoveries, but the number of people who would like to participate has quickly outstripped our capacity to build and distribute enough bee blocks. In this talk I will tell the story of our early scientific findings, insights into volunteer motivation, what we have learned about logistical growing pains, and how we use untrained volunteers to census an extremely diverse set of organisms that they almost never see.