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The SUBU Student Opportunities Team provides students with information, skills and opportunities to get involved with Clubs and Societies, Volunteering...

Science for Bumble Bees - Virtual Volunteering

Ongoing

30 places
Are you ready to look at beautiful flowers, help pollinators, and lower your blood pressure? You are in luck: Science for Bumble Bees has just launched on Zooniverse! Disciplines: Nature, Biology Task: 1-step. Identify bees and other insects in colourful high-resolution images  Science for Bumble Bees uses time lapse photography to record the diversity of pollinators visiting plants in bloom, with a special focus on bumble bees. The first set of photos were collected in the Smithsonian’s Pollinator Garden at the Natural History Museum in downtown Washington DC. In the future the researchers intend to extend the photographs across years and expand to other gardens.

What is the task? Look at pictures of flowers and identify the insects visiting them and rank plant species according to the relative number of interactions with bumble bees. The ranked list of plants will be used to inform garden managers on which plants are the best food resources for bumble bees and other day-time pollinators, and which fail the pollinators’ sniff tests. Your participation will help ensure pollinator gardens are providing a nutritious supply of food for pollinators from spring through fall. 

Try this project today at https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/kearins/science-for-bumble-bees

 

Benefits to self

Volunteer from the comfort of your own home.

Benefits to others

Contribute to global research on pollinator behaviour

Location

Virtual Volunteering

Hours per week

1-2

Employability skills

  • Digital Capability 0
  • Enterprise 0