University Place

WiBee: The Wisconsin Wild Bee App

– Welcome everyone to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. I’m Tom Zinnen. I work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for the Division of Extension Wisconsin 4-H. And on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, PBS Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW-Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight, it’s my pleasure to welcome back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab, Claudio Gratton. He’s a professor in the Department of Entomology here at UW-Madison. He was born near Rome, Italy and then his family moved to Urbana, Illinois, where he went to high school. He stayed in Urbana to attend the University of Illinois to get his undergraduate degree in biology. Then he went to the University of California in Berkeley to get his PhD in entomology. He post-doced at the University of Maryland and then in 2003 came here to UW-Madison, where he’s on the faculty of the entomology department. Tonight, he’s going to speak with us about WiBee, an app-driven community science project to help learn about and count bees. Would you please join me in welcoming Claudio Gratton back to Wednesday Nite @ the Lab?

– Thank you Tom, and thank you PBS Wisconsin for the invitation today. I’m gonna talk about WiBee, the Wisconsin Wild Bee app. It’s an app-driven community science project to get you outside to count and learn about bees. And I wanna thank a variety of collaboratives of mine, including Hannah Gaines-Day, who has been instrumental in getting this project off the ground. So what is WiBee? The WiBee is a community science smartphone app that’s designed to help you survey bees visiting your blooming plants. It’s really simple. You go out and you conduct simple, five-minute bee surveys and you track bee pollination, visiting your flowers over time.

And what you’re doing when you’re doing this is collecting data that contributes to pollinator science and our understanding of Wisconsin wild bee communities. This project really could not have happened without a variety of contributors, not the least of which were growers, who actually were interested in this project and helped us get it off the ground. Gwenyn Hill Farm in particular, who actually was one of the founding members of this and some other important people, including our developers for the app, Katie Thostenson and Colleen Satyshur, who helped with a lot of the outreach the first couple of years. So what I wanna do today is tell you a little bit about why wild bees are important. You’ve heard me say a couple of times wild bee app, and by the end of today, I hope that you can appreciate the difference between the different kinds of bees that are out there and in particular the difference between honey bees and wild bees. Then I wanna talk about why we need community science. Why is this an important dimension of understanding our pollinators in our landscapes? And then I’ll talk about how WiBee actually works and how you can get involved. So first I’m gonna give you a quiz. Can you pick the bees out of this insect lineup? This was actually a little online quiz that was offered in The New York Times a few years back, and they had pictures of these various insects, and they asked the readers to select which ones were bees and which ones were not. And these are the ones that are bees, all the ones that I have circled here.

Some of them might be pretty obvious to you, including number two up there, bumble bees. That metallic green one, number 10, the honey bee, number eight. But then there’s a few things that might have tricked you up a little bit, like number nine, that looks like a bee. It’s fuzzy, it’s orange, but notice that it doesn’t have wings. That’s actually a type of a wasp. And of course you see flies, and grasshoppers, and butterflies, all things, maybe not the grasshopper, but all things that you might see visiting flowers, but that are actually not bees. So one of the first things that we really need to do in order to understand bees better and eventually understand how we can conserve them better, is to be able to tell them apart a little bit. So there are a lot of things that might look like bees, including these things here that show up at your picnic in the fall. These are yellow and black, and they fly around, and a lot of times we call them bees, but they’re actually not bees. These are wasps, these are yellow jackets that are coming for your soda.

They’re coming for your drinks at the picnic. They love your hot dogs. These are not bees, although they’re really important members of our natural communities as predators. Bees on the other hand, actually feed on flowers. There’s other things that might look like bees that are actually also on flowers, including these wonderful little hover flies here. These actually will feed on pollen, but they’re not bees. They’re actually flies. If you look really closely at this image, you’ll see that they have two wings, instead of the typical four wings, and the body is really shiny too. And then you have others that are bee mimics, like this wonderful moth. It’s a daytime flying moth, and it’s fuzzy, and it certainly looks like a bumble bee. It even has some of the striped patterns, but it’s not. It’s in the family with the butterflies and moths. So obviously as entomologists we get, we spend a lot of time and we get very excited about identifying groups of bees and by using the WiBee app, you’re gonna learn something about how to categorize, at least some of these broad groups of insect pollinators, many of which are gonna be bees, but some of which are not gonna be bees.

So what are wild bees and why are they important? So a lot of times when we think about bees, we think about these little critters here, wonderful European honey bee. This is the workhorse of the agricultural sector a lot. Some of us have them as hobby in our backyards as well. They come in colonies, they’re social. Colonies can be quite large sometimes, and they’re really important generalist foragers. They go visiting flowers of all kinds and they’re really important for our crop pollination. Honey bees are one species of bee. The Apis mellifera, the European honey bee. It’s actually introduced into this country. It’s native to Europe, maybe parts of the Middle East, depending on which species you’re looking at. But North America doesn’t have any native honey bees. And all the ones we see here and the ones we use in our agriculture are these bees here. Bees entered the popular press a few years back, when there were reports of declines of honey bees, in particular, and magazines like Time had cover articles like this one here saying, “Imagine what happens if we had a world without bees. What would that actually look like?” Here’s an example of what might happen if we don’t have bees. This was a campaign that was done by a grocery store, a Whole Foods grocery store in New England, where they actually had their shelves with all of the normal produce that you see here. And this is what it would look like if bees were not there to pollinate some of these crops. You would see things like lettuce or some of the citrus here, but you would lose a lot of those things that we often really cherish when we go to the grocery store.

In fact, about a third of all the crop species that we purchase at the grocery store are dependent on insects for pollination. Here in the upper Midwest, things like pumpkins, apples, cranberries, cucumbers. How can you have Thanksgiving without cranberries and pumpkins and apples? I mean, this is some of the key things that we really depend on, are dependent on, on pollinators, insect pollinators. And in fact, bees are the most important insect pollinators that are out there. This is what happens if you have partial pollination. Fruits can become misshapen. They haven’t gotten enough pollen grains to actually make it into the ovules of the plant. The fruits have these crooks and nubs where they’re not marketable as they’re shown like that. Or they might abort the fruits altogether. And so the plants actually yield less fruit when you don’t have sufficient insect pollination.

Now, we spend a lot of time focusing on honey bees because they’re so convenient. They’re social, there’s a queen inside of these hives here that we’ve constructed. It’s easy to maintain them; they’re actually quite docile. There’s thousands of workers and they’re easy to move around. So we can move them into different parts of the agricultural landscape as we have different pollination requirements. Here’s an example of beehives getting loaded up on semitrucks. And a lot of them, 90% of the bees, of honey bees each year are actually moved to various parts of the country, including the almond bloom in California. That is in entirely dependent on our ability to bring in honey bees for pollination. Now in the early 2000s, there started to be concerns that the health of the honey bee populations actually were not doing as well as is needed for our agricultural sector. I could spend an entire hour talking to you just about the causes of bee declines.

But suffice it to say that there are a couple of leading issues that we have in our landscapes having to do with the loss of habitat, the conversion of habitat from natural or somewhat natural areas with lots of wildflowers, like you see in that top left panel here, to monocultures of agricultural plants that are tilled each year that are devoid of any kinds of weeds. And a lot of the crops that we grow actually don’t have flowers that bees can actually visit. There’s also an increase in the amount of pathogens and different kinds of pathogens that seem to be influencing both managed honey bees as well as wild bees. And the increase in the use of pesticides, both herbicides, which get rid of weeds that are potentially flowering and visited by pollinators as well as insecticides that are actually directly toxic or might also have what are referred to as sublethal effects on bees. Effects that don’t quite outright kill bees, but make them less efficient, or make them live less time, or maybe don’t allow them to find food as easily. All of these things are thought to be the primary causes of bee declines. True again for both honey bees and for wild bees. And in fact, the alarm bells were going off even more when we started looking more carefully at different species of our wild bees, including the rusty patched bumble bee, Bombus affinis. Here you can see a map of where it used to be found in eastern North America. That gray shading, that gray outline shows the historical extent.

This was derived from going back at, looking at old museum specimens and figuring out, where did people see these bees once upon a time. And now we only see them in and around where those yellow dots are. A much narrower range centered around the upper Midwest here, around the city of Madison in Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Chicago, and a little bit in Minneapolis. These seem to be the most common places to actually find the rusty patched bumble bee. So a huge constriction and restriction of the range of this bee. A lot of these dots on this map, it’s worth noting, are actually observations from community scientists who went out there and actually made these observations, and then reported them to different agencies. This is actually how these maps are created. So community and citizen scientists are really important in actually helping us see what these ranges are like and how these trends are changing over time. If you’re interested in the bumble bee aspects in particular, I can’t say enough about a project here in Wisconsin called the Wisconsin Bumble Bee Brigade. Head on over, just do a search on Google for the Bumble Bee Brigade.

Our colleagues at the Wisconsin DNR have this wonderful program with lots of great resources where you go out, you take pictures of bumble bees, you learn to identify individual species of bees, and then you help build some of these data sets that I talked about. Wisconsin has over 400 different species of native wild bees and they’re amazing pollinators. So in addition to the honey bee, which is just one species, there’s a huge diversity of bees out there. Some of them are small, some of them are really big, like those bumble bees. And we think that these could be really viable alternative pollinators of our crops as well as all of our wildflowers that are out there that also need insect pollination for them to set seed. Now the really important thing about these wild, naturally-occurring pollinators is that they have a diversity of ways of making a living out there. Some of them are active earlier in the season, they come out when it’s a little cooler, when honey bees might not like to forage all that much. They have different preferences for different flowers. They have something, some of the species have something that is called a buzz pollination that allows them to actually liberate the pollen that’s on some plants that doesn’t like to come out. They often deposit more pollen every time they visit a flower compared to what honey bees do.

And what we found is that this diversity of bees, when they’re present on orchards, seems to be related to an increase in the ability of plants to set fruit and for fruits to be bigger and for yields to be bigger. These are some of the studies that we’ve done here in Wisconsin on apples for example. But it’s also a much broader phenomenon that we’ve seen, that other researchers have seen throughout the world. A greater diversity tends to give you a greater way to pollinate these species, especially given variability in climate and weather and conditions in the agricultural environment. Again, the main difference between native bees and honey bees, honey bees are colonial, they’re social, they have a queen, they have these big, waxy hives, and it’s a single species. On the other hand, wild bees tend to have a variety of different life histories, different ways of making a living. A few of them are social as well, like these bumble bees that you see on your screen that are cavity nesters. There’s a single queen and a bunch of workers that help build these waxy nests. They do so in the hollows of trees, they do so sometimes in your house. Some of them nest underground.

Some of them nest in trees and little crooks, you know. A lot of them actually reuse the abandoned nests of rodents in holes in the ground. Others on the other hand are stem nesters. These might be these tiny, little, solitary bees, where mom does all the work; it’s only her. She doesn’t have workers to help her. And in each one of these tubes here that you see, these are just some bamboo stakes that we kind of cut open like this. Solitary bees will go in there, some species will go in there and actually provision a nest, where they’ll lay eggs on top of pollen balls. And that’s where the young actually are raised. What most people don’t know is the majority of bees actually are ground nesting. About 70% of the species of bees out there nest in the ground.

And what they do, here you can see these little mounds, these little dirt pockets on a sandy patch of soil here in the city where I live. That in the spring are really active with these ground nesting bees. And what they do is they will dig these holes below ground. Sometimes they might be a few inches deep, sometimes they might go as far as 12 inches or even deeper. And the mom builds these chambers on the side of this main shaft and will, over a period of a day or two, provision a pollen ball. This is what bees are doing when they go and visit flowers. They’re looking for pollen. This is their main resource that they use to feed their young. The pollen is where the protein is, where the lipids are, where the fats and the protein, this is like the. . . This is where the, this is how they build the tissues of their young. They’ll collect it on their body. Their bodies are exquisitely textured to cling onto the pollen. They rub it off of their body, they pack it into these balls, they’ll spit up on it a little bit, maybe with some saliva that has some microbes. It starts to ferment and then they will lay a single egg on top of these pollen balls. And that’s where the entire life of the juvenile takes place. So if Mom doesn’t get this right, if the balls are not big enough, or the pollen is not diverse enough, or it’s contaminated in some ways, Junior can’t make it to adulthood. They will feed on that ball and eventually they’ll pupate. That ghost-like image that you see in the corner there is the pupa.

They will emerge as adults and either repeat the cycle the same year, or they might wait until the next year to then emerge from the ground and continue that cycle. This is actually the life of most of the solitary bees, the wild bees that we see in our landscapes. So the question that we often got from our collaborators, from our farmers is, “Well, there’s all these great bees that are out there. They’re visiting the flowers in my orchards and in my vegetables. Can I rely on them instead of honey bees for pollination? What if I can’t find honey bees? Or what if the price of honey bees just becomes too high because they’re harder to find? Can I rely on them for pollination?” And really what that meant for us is where is it that they occur in the landscape? Where is it that they’re more common? What influences their abundance? And can we understand that? And if we can understand that, then perhaps we can go out and make some recommendations about things that you could do to enhance their populations, or places in the landscape where they’re already abundant enough to provide that particular service. In fact, bees vary extremely at the local farm level. If you have lots of flowers or if you planted pollinator strips on your farm or even at your own house, you will have a tendency of attracting and even building populations of wild bees there. So a farm that looks like this is gonna have a much different bee abundance and bee communities than a farm that looks kind of like this one here. These are apples with a pretty clean understory. Maybe it’s mowed grass, maybe you’ll see a few dandelions in the spring, like that.

You would expect to have very different abundances of these wild bees under these two different conditions. Bee communities also vary depending on the surrounding landscape. They’re mobile. Mom is going around looking for food and if there’s some nesting areas near crop fields, they will move into the crops to actually look for food there. So a landscape that looks like this one here, where you have as far as the eye can see, other crops that may or may not need pollinators is gonna be really different than a landscape that looks kind of like this one here, where there’s a mixture of pastures, and agricultural fields, and wood lots, and things like that. Very different environment for building bee populations that require food sometimes year-round. So this kind of variability in the landscape and in the farming environment makes it actually very difficult to know under what conditions are you likely to get more or less bees. So this is where we thought we could rely and use our partnerships with growers and with other folks on the ground that are interested in bees to help build this, the data that we need to actually make some of the predictions about where bees may or may not be. So this is how we turn to community science as one way to solve this problem. Mainly, we need lots of data to really understand what these patterns are like.

There’s only so much that researchers with a butterfly net can actually do, going out in the environment and seeing where they are. So one solution to this was really to develop a community science tool to expand our ability to see bees in the landscape. And this is what we developed as WiBee, the Wisconsin Wild Bee app. So how does this actually work? It’s actually quite simple. First of all, you can get your mobile device here. You can go to either the Apple store or the Android Google Play store and search for WiBee, the Wisconsin Wild Bee app. It’s got this little icon that’s got the little yellow background with the white bee on it and download it. It’s free, it doesn’t take up a lot of space, and it’s very easy to use. And what the app will do is it will train you to complete short surveys for bees, five-minute surveys. And when you do this, you get to record the data and actually have it available to you on your device so you can actually start building some knowledge about bees on your own property, or on your own farm, or at your own garden, for example.

And the app then also contributes that data to a database that we’re building for others to see as well. And I’ll say more about that in a second. Now, as I talked about at the beginning, sometimes it’s hard to actually differentiate some of the groups of insect visitors to flowers. So one of the things that the app and some of the resources that we provide online help you do is to actually learn how to tell some of these groups apart. As I said, there’s over 400 different species of wild bees out there. You certainly won’t be able to tell 400 different species apart when you’re done with this. In fact, most entomologists wouldn’t be able to do that either. And so we’ve simplified the world into six different categories. Bumble bees, which are those fuzzy yellow and black ones that you’re probably seeing, you know, on your flowers most of the time. Honey bees, those golden workhorses of the agricultural sector, that one species of introduced European honey bee.

And then we’ve simplified a lot of diversity out there into these three other categories. Large dark bees, small dark bees, and green bees. These are metallic, iridescent bees. And these probably represent the vast majority of the bees that are actually out there. And then you may see things on flowers that are not bees, like those flies, or like butterflies, or other beetles, and things like that, that are visiting flowers, but might also be providing a pollination service as well. So with a little bit of help and a quiz, you’ll learn how to identify some of these major groups. You get talked through how to differentiate some of the main characteristics that the insects have on them that allow you to tell them apart. Are they shiny, how many wings do they have, what is the shape of their antennae? So in the process of doing this, you’re gonna learn something about how bees actually look and what insects actually look like in the environment. The process is actually really simple on the device. You start by starting a new survey.

And really all you do is identify an area where there are flowers that is about three feet by three feet in size. You go up to it, you record a little bit of information about the site, describing the survey habitat in which you’re in. Is this your garden? Are you a farmer and you have an orchard? You know, what flowers are we actually looking at? We want people to make observations on a single type of flower, not a single individual flower, but a uniform type of flower that’s out there. Maybe it’s apple blossoms or if you’re in your garden and you have lots of different things, maybe you just pick tomatoes for that particular observation. And you say something about the survey conditions. Bees, kinda like me, like to be outside when it’s really mild and sunny and not too windy. So we wanna make sure that you’re making observations under conditions where you might expect to see bees. So then what you will do is actually count the number of visits to a flower. So this is different than counting the number of bees that enter your three by three area. It’s really the number of times that the flowering parts, that the reproductive part of the flower is touched by an insect.

This is actually what matters to the plant. This is what we refer to as visitation. Does the reproductive part that has the pollen on it get touched by an insect, which means the pollen is gonna get picked up by them and does another flower have pollen deposited on it? So this is really kind of a plant perspective on how active bees are and is really what we’re measuring here. And it’s a measure of insect activity, of pollinator activity in the area. So then you hit go and a timer starts at five minutes and it goes down, and really what you have is a digital tally. You know, you will click on the buttons that there, that correspond to the things that you saw. Like bumble bees, or honey bees, or the large darks, and so on like that. And when the timer’s over, you have a chance then to fix any mistakes. Maybe you hit one of the buttons twice and you didn’t really mean to see four honey bees, you only saw three of them. You have a chance to go in and edit it, and then you can submit that observation.

When you do this, it will get synced to your account so you can have access to it both online and on your device. And again, we get to collate that information and collect it so that we can start building these data sets. Now because of that variability in bee activity that we find within a farm, among different crops, what’s really helpful for us is if at least three of these five-minute observations are made on any one day. And even better is if you can repeat that set of three on a couple of consecutive days. So three observations, five-minute observations in one day and three sets of those. So nine total observations over the course of a couple of days is the kind of information that really helps us create that robust data that we are really looking for. But if you only do it once, we’re happy with that as well. And then there’s a place on the app for you to actually see your own observations there, and you can go back as far as you’ve been recording. You can see the kinds of things that you’ve observed. You can see particular dates, or filter it by particular habitat types, or crops, or maybe places in your yard that you’ve been.

And you can answer that question that you’ve always been nagged with every year. “Are there more bees in my garden this year than there were last year?” Or you know, “I planted all those wonderful pollinator strips. Is it actually doing anything?” Well, you can actually collect your own data to actually do this. Another really important thing is that because of the ease of use of this particular WiBee platform, we’ve gotten participation from folks from all different kinds of communities. Growers have submitted observations from their own farms, scouts or other agricultural professionals that work with growers have been collecting this information. We had a nature center intern who reported over 300 observations on their own particular properties that they were working on. As researchers, we often use it because it’s a very nice and standardized way of making these coarse observations. A few years ago here in Wisconsin, we partnered with the Wisconsin Master Gardeners program, and this can be used annually as part of the volunteer hours. And we’ve also used it in classrooms and have students make observations in different parts of their school, or their gardens, or even their homes, as part of a curriculum that people have developed around that. So it’s really been fun to watch people use it, and people from actually all over the world as well.

Looking at some of the data from 2021, we had over 2,200 individual surveys submitted. These are those five-minute surveys. With 311 unique participants submitting surveys, and a quarter of them almost, about 20% of them submitted more than those nine surveys that we love to get. But we’ll take anything, as I said. And then one of the neat things that you can do is actually explore our data dashboard, which is available for anybody to see, and actually look at some of the patterns of the bees in the environment. So this is just a map that that I was able to create very quickly, looking at bee visitation to different crops that we have here in Wisconsin. Like apples, which you can see have a big spike of activity in mid May when apple blossoms are out, and cranberries which are more active, bees are more active during their bloom period at the end of June and beginning of July. And then some of the other crops there as well. So we can start building a data set of these observations across different crop types. I mentioned that we collect this data.

One of the things that’s really important for us in building these relationships between the environment, the habitats, and bee abundance is understanding where bees were actually seen. And to do this, we rely on the functionality of people’s smartphones to actually record the GPS coordinates of where those observations are made. So you have to give it permissions on your phone to actually allow it to do this. Now, when we provide the data in this public dashboard here, which you can see the link for, we anonymize it, we kind of aggregate at the scale of almost five miles by five miles. So nobody else is gonna be able to go in and actually see where your house is. But we on the backside as researchers will actually get to merge this information with data about, you know, what the landscape looks like, at a much finer scale. And you of course will have that information on your own phone as well. So we really do make the data here as anonymized as possible, and still useful for others to actually see some of these patterns, and I can’t thank our collaborator Ben Bradford enough for actually developing this website here. You can go there, whether you’re part of the project or not, you can go there and actually look at the data and see what the trends look like. And as I said, this is a real-time interactive data.

So this is actually what it’s looking like, so far in Wisconsin. It’s a little hard to see, but those little rectangles is where we’ve gotten survey submissions for so far in 2022. The data is actually quite rich, and what we hope to do over time is to actually build some relationships between when and where bees seem to be found. What are some of the factors that are associated with them? Are things getting better or worse over time? And even though we aggregate things, the bees to these large groupings, like bumble bees versus the large dark bees. These general patterns can still be useful in seeing where in the environment bees can be most seen. And what are some of the correlates of why we actually see them there. Here’s some of the filters that you can use, and I won’t spend any more time on that, but you can have some fun. So why should you participate? Well, first of all, it’s fun. It’s an opportunity to go out and make some observations of bees. And if that’s all you did, you just took five minutes to go out there and make a survey of bees, I think you’ll be surprised.

A lot of times, these little animals that are working really hard in the environment, often right under our nose, just go unnoticed. And if you just take five minutes to sit down and take a deep breath and literally hear the bees, it’s just amazing I think, the experience that you will have. And it’ll open up this world of all these small, little animals that are living in and amongst us, and often providing these really important services to us. So even if that’s all that we were able to get is to get you looking at bees, even just for five minutes, I’ll take that as a win; I think it’s really important. It’s also really easy to do, so it’s not something that, you know, will take a lot of time to learn how to do. You can be out there doing it as soon as the weather is good. And as I said earlier, the data is yours to explore. You can watch how these bee communities change over time on your own property, and whether they are influenced by the kinds of management that you do or the kinds of enhancements that you do. And of course, you’re contributing to pollinator science because we have this growing database of bee observations out there. This, what we hope to do with this data is ultimately build it out into a tool that can actually be useful for decisions made on farms or as an educational resource for the community as well.

So for working with some of our farmer collaborators who are working to really try to develop some of these relationships between where we see bees and whether this actually translates into anything useful for management purposes. For anybody else, you get to learn about bees, both wild and managed, and hopefully this opens up a world of opportunities for you. And for researchers, this is a growing database for much needed data on where bee activity is the most common. So last parting words, again, WiBee, the Wisconsin Wild Bee app. Here’s the link for it. Download the app. Learn to identify our six pollinator groups. Read and watch our short, little videos on how to tell some of these groups apart. Get out there and make some surveys, and then you can sign up for our quarterly newsletters, visit our website, and just become part of this growing community out there. Thank you so much, and I hope to see you on WiBee.