I had posted earlier Backyard Beekeeping: Native Bees about a local Parks and Recreation class that I had signed up for. It was a small class of about a dozen people held in an outbuilding at a local farm. Not quite the hands on course that I had hoped for, but it was a wealth of resources and information about bees in Oregon. One thing that surprised me was the huge number of bee species (>500) that are found in Oregon. It's actually quite a bit harder than I thought to not only identify a particular species, but just to differentiate them from wasps and even flies of equivalent size. Seems like it would be a daunting task for a vision ML model unless you could get mulitple shot angles (views) of the same bee and include a size reference.
There is an effort supported by the Oregon State University Extension program (Oregon Bee Atlas) to build a database of Oregon bees using the Citizen Science approach to capture data.
The instructor shared pictures from her own garden where she had quite a variety of native bees because of the types of plants in her landscape. Some were unusual like the Wool-Carder Bee that is named because it harvests fiber from plants for its nest. They are particularly attracted to a plant called Lamb's Ear.
Photo by Amy Campion
That led into a discussion of Pollinator garden designs using native and non-native plants.
Here's an example for our area:
A side benefit of participating in the Save the Bees Challenge has been learning about our native bee population.
Hopefully, I'll have bees of my own soon. Certainly will have a Bee Hotel 
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I recently acquired an RPi Global Shutter Camera and I think I may use that in an image capture project to be able to provide data to the Bee Atlas.
