New App Helps Track Activity of Wisconsin Bees

Friday, August 27th, 2021 -- 8:06 AM

(Wisconsin Ag Connection) The new smartphone app has been launched as a new citizen science project to observe and collect high-quality data on the abundance, diversity and activity of wild bees in Wisconsin.

According to the Wisconsin Ag Connection, the program was unveiled last year by a research team led by Claudio Gratton, a professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Entomology, with funding from the Ira and Ineva Reilly Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment and Gwenyn Hill Farm.

More than one-third of the planet's food crops depend on pollination, and bees are the most efficient pollinators in many cases. In Wisconsin, bees are essential to many of the state's fruit and vegetable crops such as cranberries, cherries, melons and squash.

The WiBee app collects bee visitation data through user surveys. Each survey takes five minutes to conduct and involves users watching bees as they visit flowers in a three-by-three foot area.

Since bee behavior is highly influenced by time of day, weather or even just a single cloud passing over, large quantities of data are needed to be able to develop pollination management recommendations.

Last year, 116 app users conducted 891 surveys in total, and things are on track to at least double this amount in 2021. For more information about the WiBee app, visit https://pollinators.wisc.edu/wibee

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