Great Sunflower Project – Bee Activity in Home and Community Gardens

Gretchen LeBuhn, Associate Professor at San Francisco State University writes:

“I’ve just launched the Great Sunflower Project, a citizen science project designed to learn about how bees are doing across the North American continent and how the pollination of our garden and wild plants are being affected. We are especially interested in finding out what is happening in urban gardens. As you probably know, we know very little about bee activity in home and community gardens, but we do know how important they are for food production.

“The project is simple. We’ll send folks some free native sunflower (Helianthus annuus) seed and twice a month, we’d like them to time how long it takes for 5 bees to visit one flower on that sunflower. This information will give us an index of pollination that we can compare across the continent. Once we know where bees are in trouble, we can start developing a plan to help them.”

Find out more about this important project here: “Great Sunflower Project”.

Photo by Ginny Stibolt