Citizen science is becoming more and more popular these days, although no universal definition of the term exists. The most important aspects include the recruitment and training (or instruction) of volunteers – so-called citizen scientists. Even though citizen science has a long tradition in entomology and especially in the research on honey bees and bumblebees, the term has only been used for a relatively short time.
Researchers from the University of Graz for the first time ever investigated what motivates beekeepers to voluntary participate in a citizen science study like INSIGNIA. This specific group of citizen scientists was also asked what expectations they had from participating, which study aspects were easy or difficult for them and whether they saw added value from their participation.
The project can roughly be divided into two large parts. The first one served as a pilot study and was conducted from May to September 2019. A total of 16 beekeepers from four European countries (Austria, Denmark, UK and Greece), each with three bee colonies, took part. The aim was to identify the best suitable of four possible non-invasive sampling techniques. Part two of the project took place from May to September in 2020 and was based on the experiences of the previous year. A total of 82 volunteers from 10 European countries (the four mentioned, plus Belgium, Norway, Italy, Latvia, France, Ireland) took part and examined the environment – each one with two of their colonies.
The beekeepers’ tasks included taking samples from two bee colonies every two weeks, as well as regular online documentation of the samplings, reporting the flowering plants in vicinity of the test apiaries, storage and transport of the samples, as well as answering a voluntary survey at the end of the 2020 season.
What have we learned about the citizen scientists?
The INSIGNIA study has been running now for two years and we are entering the final stage. In these two years, we have gone through all stages of organizing an apiculturist citizen science study. We developed the passive sampler APIStrip, the efficient matrix to capture pesticides, and all the pitfalls that came on the way like the “not-to-be -misinterpretable” label, best practice for storage shipping, sampling schemes etc. Now it is time to bring all of this information together in the “Guideline for apiculturist citizen science for applying honeybee colonies for bio-monitoring of the environment – subject pesticides”. Given the Covid-19 restrictions, physical meetings to discuss all of the stages, best wording, most logical set-up, best flow-charts, and whatever it takes to write the best guidelines, would be great but are sadly impossible. Therefore we have started a scheme of virtual Teams-meetings with a strict agenda to go through all of these aspects. We started in December 2020 and will be finished in March 2021. There will be as many Teams-meetings as it takes to get the job done in time.
