Diario del proyecto NCSU Campus Bee Competition

Hi everyone,

You blew me out of the water with participation in this round of the NCSU Campus Bee Competition! We had a whopping 930 bee observations submitted from April 1st - 22nd with 13 observers participating. I want to thank everyone for their hard work and dedication to capturing records of our campus pollinators.

With that said, I want to congratulate @lizarddwizard for winning the prize for the most submissions with 320 observations across 10 different bee species. I want to also give a huge shoutout to @erinpeters_ and @pen_hunter for their immense efforts as well - there was a lot of back and forth and I wasn't sure who was going to come out on top!

This round of the competition saw 18 different species recorded (and that's just what has been identified so far - hopefully our resident iNaturalist bee experts will go through all of the submissions and give their opinions on all the species we captured). With surprise to nobody, carpenter bees came out on top with over a third of the submissions. We had a lot of honey bees and some bumble bees as well. What was super interesting to me were the submissions of some very cool solitary species that were observed. We now have records of mason bees using our bee hotels! There is a lot of interesting data here that I hope will inform future pollinator garden implementation and management.

While I am graduating, I am very happy to report that the NC State Sustainability Fund has granted the Bee Campus USA Committee funding for two internship positions next year. This means that there will be a continuation of the work I've started, and hopefully more work with campus bee iNaturalist data!

As a side note, if you would like to check out some interactive exhibits featuring this data, both Hunt and D.H. Hill libraries have displays currently.

Thank you to everyone who interacted with bees on campus and who participated in pollinator conservation!

Signing off,
Ren Rooney
lnrooney@ncsu.edu
rooneyren9@gmail.com

Hello everyone and welcome to the second round of the NCSU Campus Bee Competition! Everyone is encouraged to interact with the wildlife around them this Earth Month by observing and uploading pictures of the bees they see on campus.

Any iNaturalist competition submissions automatically become part of a large dataset mapping bees all over the world. This is super important for conservationists to get an idea of what bees are present and being seen by people.

The map below shows all of the different iNaturalist observations of bees on NC State's campus from 2016-2023 and breaks down more information about each type of bee. Previous submissions to the NCSU Campus Bee Competition are included in the dataset!

As an added bonus, whoever submits the most bee observations from April 1st to Earth Day (April 22nd) will win a "sweet" prize. Thank you for your participation, and happy bee-searching!

Congratulations to our first NCSU Campus Bee Competition winner, @leahguercio! She submitted 23 observations of 3 different bee species. I want to say a huge thank you to her and everyone else who participated!

Overall, we had 66 observations of 4 different bee species. Common Eastern Bumblebees (Bombus impatiens) were by far the most observed, with Eastern Carpenter Bees (Xylocopa virginica) and Western Honeybees (Apis mellifera) coming in second and third. I also submitted a picture of a sweat bee observed at one of the pollinator gardens on Centennial campus!

I will be re-opening this iNaturalist group and encourage everyone to keep submitting bee observations around campus. This will help us to continue to identify areas with high densities of bees, the diversity and abundance of different species, and more! We also may be conducting another competition in the Spring, so stay tune for that!

Thanks for reading and keep beesearching!
Ren

Hi everyone! We are about a week into this competition with about a week to go. Thank you to everyone who has participated so far - we've got some great submissions! It looks like Common Eastern Bumblebees are winning as our most commonly sighted species.

As a reminder, it is preferable that observations are submitted from NC State owned property just to keep the area of interest specific. :) Here is a map of the current NCSU pollinator gardens (many of which are active with bees right now!).

Please feel free to reach out to lnrooney@ncsu.edu if you have any questions.

Hi everyone! Here is some information about identifying bees versus wasps versus flies. Did you know that these insects are also great pollinators?

Here are some common bees you may see:

And an even more in-depth identification guide if you're curious!:

https://content.ces.ncsu.edu/the-bees-of-north-carolina-identification-guide

Feel free to email me at lnrooney@ncsu.edu if you have any questions. Happy bee-searching!