Earthworms

As flowers bloom, bees rev up their pollinating rounds, and a host of Community Scientists are helping local pros explore key bee-health questions: what promotes bee diversity and bee-plant interactions in residential and community gardens?                 This is Shutterbee! Backyard bee photography to improve conservation practices. Nina Fogel, Ph.D. co-leads this multi-year project from the Billiken Bee Lab at Saint Louis University with founder and Webster U professor Dr. Nicole Miller-Struttmann, and a team of fellow academics, students and community partners.                   Shutterbee is a "standardized survey." Volunteers observe strict protocols - as they strive to photograph bees on the move! Participants commit to taking their smartphone in the same hours on the same day of every month for the same walk around their gardens, and uploading photos of bees they observe into the Shutterbee project on the app iNaturalist. Project leaders identify bees and plants in these photos to evaluate how bees be