Introductory Post - July 1, 2021
For my Citizen Science Project, I decided to collect information around how many bumblebees I saw around me for a short period of time, where they were, and collect observations about what they looked like physically. The organization that this data will go towards is called the Bumble Bee Watch (https://www.bumblebeewatch.org/) who's mission is to learn more about the ecology of bumble bees and locate rare/endangered populations. To collect this data, Bumble Bee Watch takes the images of sighted bumble bees uploaded by users and uses them to locate bee populations that are in danger. For the next week or so, I'll be going outside for at least 10 minutes each day to look for bumble bees and capturing photos of those that I do see. I'll then upload those images to the website so that the data can be used. I chose to help this organization in particular because bees need support at the moment from our conservation efforts and I also just love bees.
The schedule I'll be keeping for the project (may vary due to conditions)
After observing the bees at the garden for around 10 minutes from 1:50 to 2:00 pm, we saw 2 or 3 different bumblebees in the swarm of other honeybees. They flew around but always seemed to come back to the same large pink flowers. The bees were significantly larger than their fellow honeybees. They had several yellow and black stripes on their backs, and looked fuzzier from up close. They made a soft humming noise as they flew around, and their wings looked to be approximately an inch long, about as long as their bodies.
In the garden from 11:00 to 11:10 am, we didn't see any bumble bees or hear much of a humming noise like they usually make. It was windy and cloudy which may have contributed to the lack of bees, because they find it hard to fly in such windy weather. While we didn't see any bumblebees, we saw a few honeybees flying around the general area near their hive. They didn't make as loud of a humming sound as they usually do because there were less outside. The flowers (pink peonies) that they had been found on previously were shaking because of the wind, and we only saw a few flies land on them in the whole ten minutes.
By the BDS garden from 11:05 to around 11:25, (20 minutes), we didn't spot any bumblebees. The weather was dreary, gray, windy and it was humid out like it was going to rain. This probably contributed to this because it's harder for them to fly in the wind and rain, and the few honeybees we did see were all close to their hive. I took a few photos of the one honeybee that was on a purple flower next to its hive. It had a black spot on its back and black and yellow stripes on the rest of it, and clear, iridescent wings. We found a singular dead bumblebee on the concrete by the school. It had been alive and moving just a few minutes prior, but when we reached it we noticed that it had stopped moving. Its six legs were curled in towards its body, and it didn't move when it was poked with a stick. It had a black circle and one black stripe on its back and clear brown wings.
In Harvard Square from 1:30 to 1:40, I saw two bumblebees flying around. One of them flew around a nearby tree and landed a few times on both the trunk and the leaves (right). The other bee flew over my shoulder and onto my book, where it stayed for about 15 seconds. It had a furry yellow section on its back with a black oval shape in the middle, and then one yellow and two more black stripes down its abdomen. It had two beady black eyes in the front of its head, relatively small compared its body, and two small antennae between them. It also had six legs with the front four being about the same size and the back two being a bit thicker. Because of how close up I was able to take the picture from, it gave me a clear view of its claws, or the ends of each leg that seemed to split into two. Its wings took up a bit over a third of its body and were clear, shiny, and tinted a warm shade of brown.
By collecting all of this information, I learned that there are many different types of bumblebees that you can generally tell apart from the patterns on their backs. I also learned that the weather plays a factor on how many bees are outside, specifically that windy, cloudy, and rainy weather leads to less bees. I've also never noticed before that many of the bees in our area have black circles on their bodies as we usually just imagine them with stripes, or noticed that they have tiny claws on the bottoms of their legs. In the future, my project and the data I've collected can help organizations like Bumble Bee Watch track different bumblebee populations and help conserve the endangered ones. It will also help track the behaviors of bumblebees in different places at different times to help us get a better understanding of these insects.