There’s a big buzz about bees at UC Santa Barbara.
The university is part of the Big Bee Project, a collaboration between 13 institutions to create an online library of bee photos and data, so researchers and the public can learn more about the insects.
"The Big Bee Project is a National Science Foundation-funded initiative," explained Katja Seltmann, Director of UCSB’s Cheatle Center for Biodiversity & Ecological Restoration. "It's grown from that, but the core intent is still there. It's to unlock the collections information we have (at museums) around our wild bees."
"In California, we have about 2,000 species of bees," said Seltmann. "Most of those are solitary, ground-nest bees. They're not honey bees, which are managed bees. For the longest time, all of this great information was locked away behind closed doors. Not everyone can go into the back rooms of a museum, open the doors, and see what's in there. It's really a way for us to put it out there."
The National Science Foundation provided $3 million for the project being led by UCSB.
"The project has been going on since 2021. We have 16,000 species represented in the database, which is pretty good out of the 20,000 species or so worldwide," said Seltmann.
Researchers can use the data to learn more about the lives of bees.
Seltmann said UCSB tapped into its bee collection for the Big Bee Project, but relied heavily on bees from much larger institutions, which have bigger bee collections.
"We have a smaller collection here—bees, plants, everything. We have about a million specimens. Before I came here, I was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Their insect collection has 25 million specimens. We asked for loans of bees from many different museums across the country," said Seltmann. They were photographed, and the data was added to the massive online library.
She said it's a never-ending project.
What would she want to explore next, after bees?
"I have gotten interested recently in sand wasps, which are more obscure than bees, but if you go to any beaches in California and other places, you've probably seen them," said Seltmann. "They're large wasps that kill flies, dig in the sand, and lay eggs on the flies they kill. They are just really neat."
