This Saturday morning, a group of citizen Scientists will be at McArthur Island Butterfly Garden counting bees to find out what types of pollinators, like bees, are in Kamloops, particularly bees. A Citizen Scientist is a group of people who’ve been trained to North American standards to identify pollinators to guilds.

Organizer Elaine Sedgman says this is the third straight year it will be doing this count, and this time it will be able to better identify the specific species’ they’re counting. “What we’re also doing is that we’re collecting insects this year and we’re having a taxonomist come and identify them for us. So we will really know what the diversity is once he’s done his work.” She says the taxonomist believes there are species that have not yet been documented in the area.

“We’re trying to get some sort of idea of what pollinators are here and especially bees. We know all about honey bees, but we don’t really know about our native bees at all” says Sedgman.  “[We] really don’t know and so after this especially, after Lincoln Best who is our taxonomist who is coming here, after he has been able to ID everything, he fully thinks there are things that have not been listed here.”

The project is organized by the Thompson Shuswap Master Gardeners Association.

Sedgman last year there were fewer bees and more wasps. She doesn’t know what to expect this year because of the cooler spring.

By Jeff Andreas