Bee Season Updates
WiBee 2021 Newsletter 11: Results and Help Us Improve 👀
Thank you to our 2021 Volunteers! 2021 results are in. See our short reports for common crops and wildflowers. Please help us improve WiBee by taking our end-of-year survey.
January 30, 2022- Archive
What is The WiBee App?
WiBee (pronounced Wee-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
Explore the data
All of the data collected using the WiBee app can be viewed in our Data Dashboard. Filter by location, user ID, date, habitat type, or plant species.
The 2021 results are coming in!
Read our quick summaries of the 2021 bee data for all habitats combined, or focus on particular crops or the most commonly surveyed wildflowers and ornamentals.
Get involved in WiBee wild bee research and conservation
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.