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K-State entomologist leading project to track bee movement
A Kansas State University entomologist is leading a collaborative research project to track the movement of bee populations worldwide.
Brian Spiesman launched the website BeeMachine.AI and a mobile app in 2020, which allows users to upload photos of bees.
“All of those images and sightings go to a database that we can use to track different bee populations around the world and help conserve the diversity of bee species,” he says.
The National Science Foundation recently awarded $1 million to expand the program. Spiesman says the program can track 354 of the more than 20,000 bee species in the world.
“We’re going to museum collections where they house lots of preserved bee species,” he says. “We can photograph them, we can get their identification from taxonomist who have provided identifications, and incorporate those directly into our model.”
He says bees are vital to food production.
“We really rely on a lot of these native species to do a lot of our pollination, especially for things like blueberries and tomatoes and crops like that that are buzz pollinated,” he says. “Those kind of crops rely on a special kind of pollination that honeybees aren’t that great at.”
The project is a collaboration between Kansas State, the University of Kansas and the University of Wisconsin.
Photos: Courtesy Brian Spiesman, Kansas State University
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