Join the Great Bee Count Day on Aug. 17

A San Francisco State University project that counts honeybees around the parks, hiking trails and backyards of the United States is looking for more “citizen scientists” to join its Great Bee Count Day on Aug. 17.

The project will help researchers discover where these important pollinators are scarce and in need of help, said SF State biologist and North Bay resident Gretchen LeBuhn. LeBuhn heads up The Great Sunflower Project, a six-year effort to map how often honeybees visit gardens around the country. The Great Bee Count Day is a way to encourage the project’s corps of 100,000 volunteers to collect and upload their observations of bees, said LeBuhn.

“We don't know where pollinators are doing well or poorly so we don't have any idea where to direct our conservation efforts,” she explained. “By identifying the critical resources, we will be able to do smarter conservation. Bees are responsible for every third bite of food we eat.”

Now in its sixth year, participants in prior years have planted a sunflower in their backyards and spent 30 minutes a month counting the number of bee visits to the blooms. They then uploaded their count to the Great Sunflower Project website.

This summer, LeBuhn and her fellow researchers want the project to move beyond the backyard. They have updated the website to allow participants to report a bee they saw while on their way to the mailbox, or bees that they counted while doing a thorough search of a schoolyard or a vacant lot. With these new ways to count bees, LeBuhn hopes to find out even more about the kinds of plants and places that are inviting to pollinators.

With all that data pouring in, the team already can say a few things about where bees seem to be doing the best. Larger gardens get more bee visits per hour, and rural areas see more bees per hour than more densely-built urban areas. The reasons for this aren’t clear yet, LeBuhn said, but may have something to do with the loss of natural bee habitat in cities.

“A lot of people came to us and said, ‘now I know that I have three bees per hour in my garden, what should I do next?’” she said. “And as our project has continued, we realized that there isn’t a lot of research on the specific kinds of plants and other garden features -- like mulching or water -- that support pollinators,” she said.

All the information that comes in from The Great Bee Count Day will help researchers learn more about the most bee-friendly environments. “You don’t have to count only on this day, though,” LeBuhn said. “You can count every single day of the year.”

To join the project, visit The Great Sunflower Project website at http://www.greatsunflower.org.