[PAEE] Great Sunflower Proj expands

[Mary Jo Gibson]

Second posting

The Great Sunflower Project

While most persons have heard about Colony Collapse Disorder in honey bees, few realize that all of our pollinators, butterflies, hummingbirds, beetles, wasps, and native bees may also be in decline.  Gretchen LeBuhn of San Francisco State University has created a citizen science project to study the population of bees in North America.  The Great Sunflower Project uses a native annual plant, the sunflower, to attract bees.  Citizens simply plant sunflowers and twice monthly record the time it takes five bees to visit a blooming flower.  If no bees arrive in 30 minutes, the observation time is finished.  The Great Sunflower Project is giving small seed packets of the variety 'Lemon Queen' to participants to reduce variables in the experiment.  'Lemon Queen' grows five feet tall with 4-5" blossoms of clear yellow petals around a dark chocolate center and is just right for flower beds & even containers.  For participants who are able, distinguishing among five different kinds of bees will give even more information to the project.  The bee categories are simple:  honey bees, bumble bees, carpenter bees, green metallic bees, and "other" bees.  All data is submitted on-line or by mail.

This is a very well-planned project and it has received high praise from Sigma Xi, an honor society for science researchers.  The Great Sunflower Project can be completed by anyone and everyone.  Pollinators, especially bees, are essential to our food supply.  Bees are responsible for every third bite of food.

Please visit this website for more information:  http://www.greatsunflower.org/  

The Great Sunflower Project has expanded to include these other plants:  * While we really want Sunflower data from everyone, many people have asked if they can collect data from some other species.  So, we have expanded the list of plants that we are collecting data from to include Bee balm (Monarda), Cosmos (only the purple one), Tickseed (Coreopsis), Rosemary (non-native, herb), Lacy Phacelia, Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) and Goldenrod (Solidago canadensis).   When you go to the submit observations page, you will have the option to choose Lemon Queen sunflower or any of these from the pull down menu.  You can follow the same procedure that you do for a sunflower.  If you would really like to send us data from a plant not on the list, please do so, however, it isn't really useful to us unless we have many people collecting from exactly the same varieties.  We also do not want to bias our data by having everyone only pick the plant that has the most bees in their garden!!  



Mary Jo R. Gibson
Penn State Master Gardener
Columbia County Coordinator
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