Washington Launches First Bee Atlas to Track Native Pollinators

The state of Washington has initiated the Washington Bee Atlas to catalog native bee species across the state. This project depends on citizen scientists, including volunteers who participated in a collecting event at Olympic National Park in July.

Species like Calliopsis scitula, the charming miner bee, and Anthidium formosum, a wool-carder bee not recorded since 1882, are now documented in the atlas. Hundreds of volunteers are working year-round to find and record native bees, aiming to establish a baseline to assess the health of native pollinators.