Have you ever wondered what species of bees are common in your garden and how many species there are? Or how the species vary through the summer?
LINC is launching the “Xwe’etay/Lasqueti Bumble bee project” to answer these questions and more about the diversity of our fuzzy pollinators. This is a “citizen science” project: we invite the entire Lasqueti community to participate.
Beginning in the spring of 2026, anyone who is interested in participating will photograph the bees in their garden (and elsewhere) as the season progresses. Photos will be uploaded to iNaturalist, a global database of biodiversity observations collected by citizen scientists. When a photo is upload to iNaturalist, it gives you a suggested ID that is then verified by experts from within the iNaturalist community. Each photo will be tagged with its location and other information (although you can choose to hide the location information from the public). Using these, we will be able to track the diversity of our bees through the summer and across the island, all the while contributing to the citizen science repository of biodiversity data. This will be publicly available to researchers and others interested in bees.
There are 32 species of bumble bee (genus: Bombus) in BC, 13 of which occur in coastal BC (plus one introduced species). But we don’t know how many of these species occur on Lasqueti. In general, the map of bee occurrence is poor through the Strait of Georgia, although there are many records of observations on the mainland and Vancouver Island. We will help fill in this map.
If you’d like to get started on learning how to identify bees, the Native Bee Society of BC has some helpful bee identification guides available as free PDFs, both on bumble bees (www.bcnativebees.org/bee-id-post) and identifying bees to genus (www.bcnativebees.org/native-bee-genera-profiles). If you prefer an interactive web page instead, the Bumble Bee Watch (www.bumblebeewatch.org/field-guide/) has a helpful tool.
Stay tuned for a webinar on Bumble Bee biology and workshops on how to use iNaturalist.
Ken and Dana will be at the winter craft fair (on December 6) with more information. – Gavia Lertzman-Lepofsky
