Why are we doing this?

This is an excellent question.

We’ve all heard how honey bees are facing problems with colony collapse and disease. And this is important because we have so many crops in the US that are now dependent on honey bees for pollination.

However, native bees are just as important, if not more so. They pollinate many of our crops (blueberries, apples, and tomatoes, to name a few), as well as countless native plants, and an alarming number of populations are in serious decline. Since the late 1990s, troubling trends have been noted. Several once-common bees, like the Rusty-patched Bumblebee (B. affinis), have disappeared from huge portions of their historic ranges…and we don’t always know why.

Many people are unaware of the value of our native insects, and as an environmental education center, we at Rogers believe that this needs to change. Because bumblebees are large and charismatic, they are a great place to start educating our neighbors about the value of insects.

iNaturalist CNY Native Bee Survey

In 2023, we established our project on iNaturalist and called it The B-Team: Central New York Native Bee Survey. Any photographs of bees that are uploaded to iNaturalist from the nine designated CNY counties (Cayuga, Chenango, Cortland, Herkimer, Madison, Oneida, Onondaga, Otsego and Thompkins) are automatically added to the project.

This initial effort is providing us with baseline data that hopefully will be used to verify species presence.

In June and July, Matt McGeary, a Fellow from the Upstate Institute at Colgate University, took on the mantle of the B-Team. He spent many hours photographing bees on Rogers Center’s properties, and creating a database from our iNatluralist images. The highlight of his summer was documenting three Northern Amber Bumblebees (Bombus borealis) onsite - a species that is listed as critical in NY.

Anyone who is interested in being part of The B-Team can contact our senior educator, Ellen Rathbone for more information. Those who’d like to contribute in the background only need to have a good digital camera and download the iNaturalist app to their phone and/or computer. Upload all bee photographs you take and if they are geolocated with our study area, they will automatically be added to our project.

Joining the B-Team

Bee Photography Tips

Photographing bees can be a tricky business, especially when trying to get images that are good enough for ID. Here are a few tips.

• Cooler temps mean the bees will be flying more slowly.

• For best chances of ID, get images of the bee’s face, side and back. Face shape, eye shape, coloration, wing venation, and leg structures all contribute to being able to identify species.

• Make sure images are well lit and not blurry (no Loch Ness- or Sasquatch-quality photos).

• For those who are more ambitious, you can capture the bees, cool them down in a cooler that contains ice, and photograph them after a few minutes while they are still sluggish. Be sure to release all bees unharmed.

The Rusty-patched Bumblebee, Bombus affinis, was once one of the most common bees of the northeastern United States. By 2000, it was discovered to have vanished from over 90% of its historic range, including NYS. There is a hotbed of these bees in northern Illinois still, where this photo was taken in our senior educator’s garden in 2019.