So we're in the Apalachicola National Forest today looking for the bee that lives in this mound.

The rarely observed sandhills cellophane bee.

Anyone who knows me knows I love bees.

These photos are from my yard.

Florida has over 320 species of native bees and I garden to try to see as many as I can.

I also drag my kids out into the forest to look for rare and local species.

Hi, this is Max.

I am here in the forest with Dad.

Dad, say hi.

When I photograph bees and other insects, I upload them to an app called iNaturalist, which helps me identify them.

So satisfying.

Apps like iNaturalist, Merlin Bird ID, and eBird have changed how a lot of us interact with nature.

But while the apps teach us about the plants and animals we see, they also collect data.

A lot of data.

And so I wondered how useful is our data to researchers?

Spring is a time for bees, butterflies and flowers.

So I'm focusing my investigation on my naturalist.

So iNaturalist has given me a name: flowering bluets, genus Houstonia.

iNaturalist is an app that can identify most living things large enough to photograph.

You take and upload photos, and it gives you a list of suggestions based on pattern recognition software.

And then other users agree or disagree with your pick.

The app also records time and place information.

Photos and data can be useful to biologists like Brian Inouye.

He's riding the Munson Sandhills in hopes of saving a rare butterfly.

One of the species that we have here in the Munson Sandhills is a little butterfly called the frosted elfin.

And this butterfly, at least in the north Florida part of its range, it's a specialist on one plant, the sundial lupine.

And so in order to find the butterfly, the best thing we can do is to find the plant.

Every spring, Brian makes observations of any sundial lupine plants he finds.

He and his research collaborators are trying to get others to do the same.

So if you see something that might look like lupine and you're not sure, or even if you are sure, you get as close as you can.

Just make sure there's nice resolution to it.

Take that photo and then you can upload it to iNaturalist.

It'll go straight to the University of Florida and notify biologists saying, Hey, there's something here.

So how do these observations help the butterfly?

The frosted elfin has disappeared from much of its range due to habitat loss.

By mapping out where sundial lupine plants are found, researchers can identify new potential locations for the butterfly or places where new plantings can bridge the gaps between populations.

Each roadside type connection could be that next steppingstone to another population for them.

Any little bit of lupine out there could be a reservoir for this rare butterfly.

And we need to know the most we can about this thing.

Citizen science apps generated tens of millions of observations in 2023, and many were of vulnerable species.

The red points on this map are iNaturalist observations used by the Florida Natural Areas Inventory, or FNAI.

They're partners in the frosted elfin project, and they monitor hundreds of plant and animal species of interest.

That's a lot of data from non-scientists like myself, about gopher tortoises, frosted flatwoods salamanders, and yes, rare bees.

But how reliable is it?

We visit one of those data points to find out.

We're going on a bee hunt.

Here at Leon Sinks, a rarely observed sandhills cellophane bee was photographed on a blueberry bush.

Maybe.

FNAI biologist Dave Almquist explains.

The iNaturalist records, to me, the pictures weren't quite 100% saying that it was that species.

It was definitely the same genus or a relative of the bee that we're looking for If a photo isn't clear or close up, a researcher might not see what they need to see to definitively ID species But the observation has location data.

And that leads us right to the Bush.

No bee.

Next, we check in the sandy areas where the bee is likely to nest.

It doesn't feel quite as soft, like beach sand or dune sand.

The places I know of with the most burrows, they seem to be much more- it's much more soft.

Like if you walked in it, it would give under your feet.

No luck here.

There are no bee nests in this sand.

But now I'm making it a point to find the bee.

The bee was discovered just a few years ago and researchers like Brian are trying to learn more about it.

If I can find it in a new place, we'll know just a little bit more about its range.

After our trip to Leon Sinks, Dave went back to his computer and found other likely spots he thought the sandhills cellophane bees might be inhabiting, and he sent me a map.

To make his map, Dave used iNaturalist data in a way he hadn't before.

He looked for plants associated with the bee's habitat.

So the sandhill cellophane bee, as the name suggests, needs sandhills to make its nests.

But those sandhills are always next to, usually next to, cypress wetlands like this one here.

Part of the reason is this wetland is surrounded by climbing fetterbush.

It's all along the edge of the wetland here.

It's a strange blueberry relative vine that climbs up trees, burrows under their bark for support and comes back out.

But it's not parasitic.

I also took records for turkey oaks because those are an indicator of sandhills, this nice dry xeric area that the bees can burrow into easily Location one: I find a cellophane bee immediately, but is it a sandhill cellophane bee?

The mounds look right, but all I have is a cell phone.

These aren't the best photos to make an observation, so it's not a definitive ID.

An identification on iNaturalist is not 100%.

A lot of the pictures of insects don't actually show the diagnostic characters.

If there's not enough detail, you can't really tell unless you can actually get a really good macro photo of some insects.

I returned a couple of times with my work camera.

You can see the difference now.

I have a research grade observation for a sandhills cellophane bee.

This means two thirds of the people who ID'd the photos agree on the species.

In this case, the people who verified the ID were biologists.

They usually check on observations related to their specialty.

So I'm trying out a whole new location here on a dirt bike trail.

I check out other sites on Dave's map, and so does he.

So I think between you and I, we've found at least three new sites for the bee.

Honestly, I'm surprised that it worked out as well as it did.

I expected to maybe find one new site, but not three of them in this short of an amount of time.

That's three new data points for Dave and his team.

Like with frosted elfin, we use the iNaturalist data for plants to help find the insects that use the plants.

Plants are much easier to photograph than small flying insects.

As for the photos of the insects themselves, quality matters.

But even if it's not 100% clear, it's new data that researchers would not have otherwise had, and they may follow up on it.

For WFSU, I'm Rob Diaz de Villegas.