Beeing Alive: The Mysterious Decline of North America's Top Pollinator

By DAVID JAKUBIAK, Contributor

If you've got bees buzzing around your backyard, your local park, your office courtyard, or your school playground, May Berenbaum would love to see 'em. Berenbaum, head of the department of entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, also runs the university's BeeSpotter program, a project that relies on citizen scientists to identify bee populations around Illinois.

With pollinator populations suffering from threats ranging from habitat loss to the mysterious malady dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder, which has ravaged bee hives around the globe, Berenbaum was tapped by the National Academy of Sciences to assess the status of North America's pollinators, which include a wide array of insects, bats and even some birds.

After analyzing available data, Berenbaum's committee released a report. "Among our conclusions was that there has been a demonstrative downward trend in the populations of managed honeybees, but comparable data simply was not available for other pollinators."

This lack of data was "shocking," Berenbaum said, "many of these pollinators are important contributors to the maintenance of not only agriculture, but also natural communities."

Berenbaum knew she needed to find a way to count pollinators. But she faced two very steep hurdles. First, she said, "there aren't enough bee biologists to count them."

And, she added, "There are some real challenges with recruiting the public to contribute to citizen science involving insects."

Berenbaum decided to limit the pollinator pool. "We needed a group of pollinators that could be easily identified without extensive training and without even handling them. So, we settled on honey bees and bumble bees." With their target established, Berenbaum's team set up a Web site where citizen scientists could report their bee sightings.

The way it works is simple. First, a bee spotter takes a picture of a bee with a digital camera. Then they visit the site, create an account, and upload their picture. They are asked to give a few bits of information, for example, the address where their bee was located, and a possible identity of the bee based on color chart on the site.

Berenbaum said anyone from a gardener to school group can become a bee spotter. "We're not asking anyone to catch these bees, and we're certainly not asking them to kill them. We just want a picture."

Since the site was launched last fall, she said, it has received more than 1,000 visits from 53 countries and 47 states. Among those visitors was Linda Slepicka of Westmont. An amateur gardener with a "big flower garden" Slepicka said she has "tons of bees. So, when I heard about it I thought, well they are trying to track where the bees are located and I have lots of bees, so why not?"

While Slepicka has never thought of herself as an entomology buff, she did say it feels good doing something for the bees.

"I'd never thought about how important bees are. But if the colonies are collapsing and you don't have the bees to pollinate your crops, it could lead to a global collapse of our food supply. You don't tend to think of honey bees as being that important," she said.

Do you have honey bees or bumble bees in your sights? To become a bee spotter or to read more about bee topics like Colony Collapse Disorder see: http://beespotter.mste.uiuc.edu/.
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FROM: Pioneer Press
Sun-Times News Group
Http://www.Pioneerlocal.com
Written by David Jakubiak, Contributor
June 19, 2008
--To view this report online, plus photos & related stores go to: www.pioneerlocal.com/evanston/lifestyles.