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  • Author Author: ralphjy
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Oregon Beekeeping: Native Bees

ralphjy

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.

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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.

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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:

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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 Relaxed...

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.

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  • in reply to beacon_dave

    I agree with that article.  Not sure how to implement a fly-thru rig.  Maybe a halo with miniature cameras?  Might be fun to try.

    The day of the class was overcast and we did not see any bees in the gardens at the farm, but I did encounter a bumblebee that afternoon while I was out walking with the granddog. The granddog was not patient enough for me to get a headshot, so I couldn't get a precise identification.  The flowers in our garden are in remission.  Probably see the next set in May.

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  • in reply to ralphjy

    The bee hotel might work with a camera setup as you can get both the head and the tail of the same bee as they do the turnaround thing. 

    I guess if you position a halo between two plants, then you might catch some as they hop from one flower head to the neighbouring one.

    A light field camera might be good for this as you can tweak focus afterwards. Shame Lytro stopped development.

    One of the problems I was having with identification, was that I would start with one bee and then end up with another bee by the time I had finished the check list Slight smile    It is a lot easier to identify them when emergency refuelling them from sugar water in a tea spoon.