'Bee' part of the future: CU seeks volunteers to digitize bee information
KDVR Fox 31
DENVER (KDVR) — The University of Colorado Museum of Natural History is seeking help from bee fans in Colorado to help convert their handwritten or typed information on bees into 1s and 0s for a digital database.
The community science project called the "Big-Bee Bonanza" will have volunteers from anywhere in Colorado get on the computer to look at old pictures and data entries for different bees that were written or typed and enter them into digital form.
With information gathered from over a century ago, this team of scientists will need all the help they can get to preserve and organize generations' worth of bee research.
“There’s been a big push over the past couple of decades to have natural history collections get that data off of paper labels and into digital formats that people can use today,” Adrian Carper, entomology curator adjoint at the museum told CU Boulder Today.
The project began in 2021 but hit a setback when pipes burst due to the cold weather during winter in 2022. The water from the burst pipes flooded the museum's collection rooms. The collection of bee specimens was saved by museum staff. It was a close call for losing that information which can be backed up by putting it into a digital database.
According to CU Boulder Today, the Big-Bee Bonanza finds itself caught in two races. The first is against the time remaining of the grant used to fund the project, which expires in 2025. The second of the races is the race to help save different specimens of Colorado bees with dwindling populations that are at risk of being endangered.
Gathering as much understanding of each type of bee will allow researchers and scientists to pinpoint the best ways to protect and preserve the population of native bees.
Bees play an important role in pollinating the plants that make Colorado so vibrant. The university reported that many of the state's bee species are vulnerable and have petitioned to have the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service place a further 20% of native bees under the Endangered Species Act which would grant federal protection.
The Entomology Collection at the museum was founded in 1905 and contains roughly 1.4 million insects from every corner of Colorado dating back to the 1870s. The amount of data recorded is already substantial and only an estimated 50,000 transcripts are needed for the remaining bees before the project grant runs out in 2025.