Help Colorado's Bees from Home

The state is home to more than 1,000 species of bees-from miner bees, which dig their nests in the ground, to squash bees, which you can sometimes catch napping on zucchini flowers. Nearly 10% of all the species of bumblebees in the world live in Boulder County.

Now, a community science project is giving people across the state and beyond the chance to dive into that colorful and buzzing world of bees.The CU Museum of Natural History is looking for volunteers to help digitize its bee collections through a project called the Big-Bee Bonanza. Anyone anywhere can participate. All you have to do is hop online to view pictures of bee specimens. Then, you transcribe information from their handwritten or typed labels into an online database-capturing scientific research from more than a century across Colorado and beyond.

"We have a large collection of bees, and yet the data associated with those collections is only found on labels. This was long before we had Excel spreadsheets," said Adrian Carper, entomology curator adjoint at the CU museum who's leading the Big-Bee effort. "There's been a big push over the past couple of decades to have natural history collections get that data off of paper labels and into digital formats that people can use today."

Bee lovers can also stop by the museum Nov. 7 from 5:30-8:30 p.m. to learn more about the Big-Bee Bonanza and Colorado's buzzing insects.

The project is an effort of CU Boulder, using the online platform Notes from Nature, with a coalition of more than a dozen universities across the country.

Carper noted that Big-Bee Bonanza will help scientists collect critical data to help them safeguard Colorado's bee species, many of which are at risk of becoming endangered. It's also a lot of fun, said Virginia Scott, collections manager of entomology at the museum.

"Few people get the chance to crawl around the cabinets and see what's in there," she said. "So we're getting these pictures of bees out there, and people can see the real thing."

Ticking clock

The researchers are in a race against time.

The CU museum's Entomology Collection was founded in 1905 and includes specimens caught by scientists as far back as the 1870s. Today, it houses roughly 1.4 million insects. Its bees come from every county in Colorado. They include everything from petite and iridescent blue carpenter bees to fluffy, yellow-and-black bumblebees. These specimens, along with their associated data, are preserved on pins in glass-topped drawers stored in metal cabinets.

Carper, in collaboration with other museums, launched the Big-Bee Bonanza in 2021 using Notes from Nature to begin to bring that collection into the digital era. Then, in winter 2022, burst pipes flooded the museum's collection rooms. Scott and her team were able to save the collection, moving the specimens to all new cabinets, but the delay set the Bonanza back for CU specimens.

Now the researchers need roughly 50,000 transcriptions before their grant runs out in 2025.

"We're trying like the dickens to get these photos out to Notes from Nature and get the data transcribed while we still can," Scott said.

The bees' labels contain a wealth of historical information. These tiny pieces of paper contain details on who collected the bee, where and when it was found, around what flowers and more. Often, scientists copied down that information by hand in old-fashioned cursive. The Big-Bee Bonanza website includes tutorials on how participants can transcribe those data.

Saving the bees

Carper added that Colorado's bees are in their own race against time.

Because of factors like dwindling habitats, climate change, disease, pesticide use and more, many of the state's native bees are vulnerable. Scientists, for example, have petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to extend federal protection to 20% of Colorado's bumblebee species under the Endangered Species Act. (Most of those petitions are currently under review). These animals are important pollinators for the state's plants, including wildflowers and many of the crops that humans depend on for food.

"Our whole goal is to make these data available so that ecologists can look at how communities have changed through time," Carper said.

He said the Big-Bee Bonanza gives people across Colorado an easy way to help the state's bees-no scientific training required.

"This is a way that the public can actually have valuable input in helping natural history collections like ours do more with the specimens we have," Carper said.