WiBee, The Wisconsin Wild Bee App: Reflections on the first year engaging growers and collecting citizen science data

While honey bees are well-known pollinators of many important food crops, wild bees often play a significant and under-appreciated role in crop pollination. For instance, in many Wisconsin apple orchards, wild bee populations are sufficient for full pollination without the help of managed honey bees. However, due to the spatial and temporal variability of wild bee populations across the landscape, as well as the short bloom duration of many crops, traditional research efforts have been unable to answer the question “Can wild bees alone support my crop’s pollination needs?” at the individual farm level. To address this challenge, in May 2020 we launched WiBee: The Wisconsin Wild Bee App, a citizen science smartphone app that growers and interested participants can use to quantify bee visitation rates by following a simple on-screen protocol and counting floral visits over a 5-minute period. From May to October 2020, over 115 participants downloaded the app and submitted over 800 surveys. By actively engaging participants in this research and seeking continuous feedback, we are building the dataset needed to make crop pollination recommendations to growers based on their local wild bee communities, and improving participants' understanding of the role of wild bees in their agroecosystems. Long term, we will use the dataset to explore wild bee population trends and the relationship between habitat and wild bee abundance, and improve recommendations to growers on whether they have adequate local populations of wild bees for crop pollination.