July 2013 Pollinator Prize Pack Photo Contest!

Vote for your favorite by liking the picture on Facebook- most likes in each category (Bee, Wasp, Nest Site and Other) will win a pollinator prize so tell your friends to vote too! Submit your photo by midnight July 31st EST to have an entry added to the album. We will tally up all of the votes (likes) for each category and announce the winner mid-August. Have Fun, Good Luck & Spread the Buzz!!!

Bee Trading Cards Competition

Hi BuzzWatchers!

Thanks to a generous donation from our friends at Resonating Bodies we will have packs of their awesome Bee Trading Cards to give away as prizes to our participants!! The bee trading cards feature macro photography of bee anatomy, life facts and color-coded DNA barcodes of some local bumble bee, megachile (leaf cutter) and osmia (spring bee) species.These trading cards are the first in a series of trading cards of pollinators featured in Resonating Bodies. This series includes only a handful of the 4,000+ species of bees which live in North America. Check out their "Bee Trading Card Gallery" to see all of the cards in Series 1. The cards have been a huge hit with teachers and bee-lovers of all ages! There are 24 cards in the first series and we broke these down into packs of 6 cards. Every week (while supplies last) we will randomly pick participants who were caught participating that week on Step 2 by adding a site, uploading a picture to our gallery, uploading data, filling out a survey, contributing nest plans, activity ideas, etc. You can win multiple times, so try and see if you can collect a complete deck of these awesome Bee Trading Cards!

Have Fun & Best of Luck!

The Buzz Team

Follow-up Questionnaire

Dear participants,

Six months ago, you may have helped us by completing a questionnaire which gave us excellent insight into your opinions, understanding and actions regarding bees and wasps. This information has helped to shape our citizen science project, social media outputs and accompanying website at www.ufnativebuzz.com. We could really use your help again to further evaluate our website and citizen science project. In order to facilitate this we have prepared a follow-up questionnaire. It includes many of the same or similar questions that you saw in the first survey. We will use your responses to better understand what you may have learned about bees and wasps over the past 6 months either through participation in our projects or elsewhere.

The link below will take you to the follow-up questionnaire which should only take about 10 minutes to complete.

Follow-up Questionnaire

To show our appreciation for your time in completing this follow-up questionnaire your name will be placed in a drawing for a chance to win the "Garden Variety Native Bee Perpetual Calendar" after we receive your feedback.

Thank you again for all of your help!

UF Buzz Team

Native Bees Calendar

This is the “Garden Variety Native Bees of North America” perpetual calendar. Check out a sample of the calendar here.

The “Garden Variety Native Bees of North America” perpetual calendar is both a guide to some of our more common native bees and a gardening calendar that never goes out of date. Included is a two-page introduction to native bees which contains tips on how to create habitat for them in your own backyard. Use the journal portion of this calendar to keep month to month and even year to year comparative garden notes. It’s a great way to record your observations of the bloom times and other characteristics of the bee-friendly plants you include in your garden, along with the numbers and different types of bees that visit them.