What is The WiBee App?
WiBee (pronounced We-bee) is a new smartphone app developed by the Gratton Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We invite growers and interested community members to use the app during the growing season to collect high quality data on wild bee abundance and diversity on Wisconsin’s fruit and vegetable farms, as well as non-crop habitats.
With your help, we can provide growers with better pollination management recommendations specific to individual farms and share more information about the diversity, abundance and value of Wisconsin’s wild bees.
Whether you are a gardener, grower, student, or just interested in bees, you can contribute to WiBee.
Download the App
The WiBee App is publicly available for anyone to use
Latest news
Pollinator Week
June 19th-25th Wisconsin is celebrating Pollinator Week! Managed by Pollinator Partnership, this week is a national opportunity for us to learn about and protect the wonderful insects and other animals that pollinate our crops and …
June 20, 2023WiBee Newsletter – May 18, 2023
It’s May and the bees are out! Plus app fixes, initiatives, and upcoming events. IMPORTANT: A new version of the WiBee app (1.28) is NOW AVAILABLE. Please visit the App Store or Google Play to …
May 18, 2023WiBee 2023 Season Kickoff
Welcome to the 2023 season of WiBee! Welcome! Thank you for being a part of our community. Your surveys provide valuable information to help us better understand pollinator activity across Wisconsin. We’d also like to send …
April 17, 2023WiBee 2022 Newsletter 9: Last Chance for Surveys! 🐝
Cucurbits are still blooming, and late season flowers as blooming soon too!
September 6, 2022- Read more
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Explore the data
All of the data collected using the WiBee app can be viewed in our Data Dashboard. Select surveys by location, user ID, date, habitat type, or plant species, and few graphical summaries of pollinator trends. Contributor names and exact survey locations are not shown on the dashboard for privacy reasons. To learn more about our privacy policy, click here.
Read our annual summaries
Read our quick summaries of the past year surveys for all habitats combined, or focus on particular crops or the most commonly surveyed wildflowers and ornamentals.
Survey Initatives
You may have noticed we added a new section to the pre-survey screen in WiBee called “Initiatives”. Selecting that the survey you are about to do is a part of an initiative helps us group these surveys for analysis, and may prompt some follow-up questions on the survey screen to get more information relevant to that initiative. Currently we have set up a few initiatives, including Master Gardener volunteer credits, and No Mow May. Learn more about each initiative with the link below.
Get involved in wild bee research and conservation
One question on the minds of many fruit and vegetable growers is: On my farm, are wild bees able to provide my full crop pollination needs in lieu of managed honey bees?
Wild bees, such as bumble, mason and squash bees, are important pollinators of our food crops. There are over 400 species of wild bees in Wisconsin alone, actively pollinating crops and wildflowers from spring to fall. Many crops are dependent on animal pollination, including apples, berries, melons, squash, and cucumbers. However, we don’t know enough about the abundance and distribution of wild bees to recommend, for an individual farm, whether wild bees alone can provide a crop’s full pollination needs.
We designed the WiBee app to be simple and easy-to-use so that with just a little preparation, growers and citizen scientists can partner with us to observe wild bees. In the app, users complete a series of 5 minute bee observation surveys on a 3 foot by 3 foot area of a blooming crop, recording the number of flower visits they observe.
We welcome collaborations with local fruit and vegetable growers who want to work with us to make WiBee a better and more useful tool for them to monitor their local pollinator populations. Please email us at pollinators@wisc.edu if you are interested.
About the project
This citizen science wild bee research project was created and is managed by the Gratton Lab in the UW-Madison Department of Entomology.
Funding for the WiBee project was provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Baldwin Wisconsin Idea Endowment and Gwenyn Hill Farm located in Waukesha, WI.
We’d like to send out a special thanks to all the apple growers who tested out early versions of the app and methods, including Atoms to Apples, Brightonwoods Orchard, Door Creek Orchard, Ela Orchard, Hafs Road Orchard, Lapacek’s Orchard, Munchkey Apples, Pleasant Springs Orchard, Ten Eyck Orchard, The Apple Hut, as well as the IPM Institute of North America.
And finally, we want to thank Jeremy Hemberger, Katy Bradford, and Colleen Satyshur, who helped develop the WiBee project along the way but have since moved on to greener pastures.
To get in touch with us, please email us at pollinators@wisc.edu.
Meet the WiBee team
Claudio Gratton
Position title: Professor and principal investigator
Email:
cgratton
Phone: (608) 265-3762
