University of Colorado Museum of Natural History needs help making its bee collection digital
November 12, 2024 | In the PressFrom Denver7.com (https://www.denver7.com/news/environment/university-of-colorado-museum-of-natural-history-needs-help-making-its-bee-collection-digital#google_vignette)
The University of Colorado Museum of Natural History is home to 200,000 bee specimens that help researchers study Colorado bees and guide future conservation efforts.
Thousands of these specimens still have old, handwritten labels, making it difficult for researchers to quickly reference data. But now, a new grant will help the museum transcribe them into a digital catalog, and you can help from the comfort of your home.
"It's a consortium grant of about a dozen institutions [and] museums across the US. We are doing several things for certain groups of bees, carpenter bees, bumble bees, mining bees, leaf-cutting bees and mason bees," said Virginia Scott, the museum's insect collection manager.
A new grant, called the Big-Bee Bonanza, is helping researchers across the country. This funds over a dozen organizations in order to digitize their bee specimens. Anyone can help out by jumping into an online portal to view and transcribe handwritten and printed labels into a digital database. This will make over a century of research quickly available to researchers around the world.
"We're going through, and we're taking the quick and dirty pictures where we spread out the labels and do the dorsal and lateral shots, and then we feed those to the Notes from Nature Project, which is an online community science project," said Scott.
Scott also expressed the excitement of getting to view specimens that are otherwise locked away in cabinets.
"It's almost like a game. You get to read the old labels. You get to see the specimens because, you know, I think it's really fascinating to get those images out to the public because a lot of the public doesn't even know that museums have collections, let alone have the opportunity to get into the cabinets and see what we have," she said.
Some of these bee specimens date back to the late 1800's.
Many of these species are at risk of becoming endangered.
"We're facing some pretty significant climate issues and urbanization, agriculture, all these things are challenging for insects," said Scott. "Four or five of our bumblebees, right now, are petitioned for endangered or threatened status. We need to go back and get those old data so we can compare to what's out there now.?"
The museum still has over 30,000 historic bee specimens still to be digitized before grant money runs out. Transcribing the specimens takes two to three minutes each, but Scott said the effort could help win the race against a ticking clock.
"We have all this historic information in the collection, and we need to mine that out because people are always asking us, 'Are bees in trouble?'" said Scott.
If you'd like to help the bees, you can visit the Notes from Nature website to get started transcribing.
