APR Native Bee Monitoring Project

Are you interested in earning hours towards your Master Naturalist certification by walking through a beautiful garden and observing bees? 🌻🐝🌻

We are accepting up to up to 10 volunteers to monitor bees for at least 5 total hours per month (or more February-November) to monitor specific sites for native bees and to photograph and film bee activity and log those observations on iNaturalist. We expect volunteers to work alone or in pairs and walk slowly through the gardens to monitor for bee activity while taking detailed field notes. This opportunity is open February - November with a two-month downtime in December-January while bees are less active. You will spend 50 hours per program year in the field including during the summers. You'll spend about 10 hours in addition to that uploading your observations with field notes into iNaturalist. The total minimum commitment for the monitoring year is about 60 hours of volunteering with 3 hours of required training. 

Volunteers must have a smart phone or macro camera with which to take high quality photos of bees and must have an active iNaturalist profile they are willing to regularly upload photos to correct geolocations to be auto added to the Native Bees of Zilker Botanical Garden project on iNat. You will also be required to log your hours here in GivePulse each month for approval. 

If you are qualified and interested please email lindsay.loftin@austintexas.gov to register. We require a 1-program year commitment from each volunteer so that you can deeply learn the garden(s) and the bees who live there and share higher quality images and observational data which come from practice and experience. You will also be required to attend the mandatory training, this year will be February 7th from 9 am - 12 pm in central Austin, location TBD. Register here: https://forms.gle/gtzQSv5RqDv8k7it5

GivePulse is where you can log your hours for training, photo editing for high quality photos (within reason), and monitoring work that you do throughout the year. All volunteer work must be done during regular garden hours.

To log hours, please select "Add Impact" and log your hours there. Do NOT register for this event as it will not count as logged hours.

Please let people who ask what you're doing in the garden know you are here to volunteer as part of the Native Bee Monitoring Project and encourage them to get involved as a volunteer as well. Thank you for volunteering!