UW Bothell and Cascadia College have made the decision to make the campus pollinator friendly, by planting attractive plants and letting certain areas grow unencumbered by mowing and maintenance. In response, students and faculty have formed the CCUWBee Initiative to record data regarding bees on campus, intending to make the data available to students and research bodies alike. Our goals as a group are to learn about abundance and species diversity of native bees on campus, to evaluate and advise UW Bothell/Cascadia’s current efforts to conserve pollinators, to explore the value of citizen science in pollinator conservation, and to educate as many people as possible about the value and conservation of bees.

With only a handful (at best) known to the general public, many of the 4000 native species of bees in the United States go unnoticed and unappreciated for the important work they do as pollinators. 90% of flowering plants rely on pollinators to fulfill their life cycles and reproduce¹. It is of the utmost importance that we mitigate as much damage to bee populations as possible, which calls for the importance of monitoring bee species diversity and abundance. The world-wide decline of bee species makes this project especially pertinent to potential researching bodies, especially as there is a notable lack of data regarding bees and other pollinators.

CCUWBee research uses a morphogroup approach to sort bees into highly similar-looking categories. Many times bees that look very similar are highly related to each other, often allowing us to identify each species to the family level. It is believed that this approach to the studies should be effective in collecting meaningful data. One 2011 study found that in general citizen scientists can be quickly and easily trained to collect data that are similar in species diversity and abundance to those samples collected by professional scientists. Furthermore, when trained to identify similar species to higher taxon these budding citizen scientists were able to identify the samples they collected with fairly high accuracy¹. Therefore, students that receive relatively little training (10 hours were given in the Kremen et. al. study) from an experienced CCUWBee member should be able to accurately distinguish between floral visitors and identify bees in eight unique morphogroups.

There are two study protocols we follow, each protocol focusing on species diversity or abundance. The abundance-focused surveys select a blooming patch of flowers of a single variety (a lavender bush, for example) and tallies all the bees seen there in a 1.5 m² area for 10 minutes. This is repeated three times, and then 20 minutes are left to take photos of the bees visiting the selected flower patch. The diversity surveys focus on a predefined area that contain the flowers the abundance surveyors observed in that same week. There are 40 minutes given to take photos of bees visiting floral resources in that area, both on the floral patch observed by the abundance team and on other flowers planted there.

This citizen science project will inform the schools and facilities managers how the pollinator gardens affect bee species diversity over time. The hope is that information regarding trends in bee species will help the schools better provide habitat for these important pollinators. The studies shall take place over the course of several years, with each year’s data being analyzed and compared to the previous years. With enough data, trends should emerge involving the time of day and year bee species are active; what kind of habitats they prefer and therefore what kind of habitats should be planted; and the effectiveness of the planted pollinator gardens on attracting native bees.

Preliminary results from the 2018 surveying year show bumble bees to be by far the most abundant group seen, representing 55% of all bees observed; 23% observed were honey bees, and 77% were Bombus sp. or other bee species.

Ultimately, CCUWBee is striving for a searchable, educational, and scientifically relevant archive of the bees found on the CC/UWB campus, and to discover where campus grounds should focus efforts to support our native bees, and how the colleges can, in general, make the campus a more bee-friendly place in policy and practice.

1. Kremen, C., K. S. Ullmann, and R. W. Thorp. “Evaluating the Quality of Citizen-Scientist Data on Pollinator Communities.” Conservation Biology 25.3 (2011): 607-17. University of California, Berkley College of Natural Resources. Society for Conservation Biology, 2011.