For an insect with so many species, such a vast range and a seriously important job, there is, oddly, a paucity of data on Anthophila. Better known as bees, they are pollinators extraordinaire, makers of honey and, sure, the ladies can sting. Their significance to food production and plant health worldwide is undisputed — and in trouble.

That’s where Big-Bee(link is external) flies in.

The multimillion-dollar, multi-institution project being led by UC Santa Barbara aims to illuminate what’s driving bees’ decline by addressing that lack of data. With $3 million from the National Science Foundation and a three-year timeline, the collaborative effort will create more than 1.3 million bee specimen images from 5,509 agriculturally and phylogenetically important global bee species.

As a result, information about where and when a specimen was collected will be supplemented with over a million high-resolution 2D and 3D images. The data that is extracted — about bees’ anatomical and behavioral traits, for example — will be made freely available online, enabling more and better research on bees that sheds light on how their populations have changed over time and, significantly, why.

“A bee’s anatomy can change in response to its environment,” said UC Santa Barbara’s Katja Seltmann, an entomologist and principal investigator on Big-Bee. “By studying these images, researchers like myself will be able to infer how resilient different bee species and populations are to stressors like climate change or habitat loss.