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  8. 25 & 26.02.2025 - Kick-off event “Citizen science nesting aid project: Researching wild bees 2025”

25 & 26.02.2025 - Kick-off event “Citizen science nesting aid project: Researching wild bees 2025”

To start the new project year, the first training courses for the Wild Bee Project 2025 took place on February 25 and 26.

The team from the Didactics of Natural Sciences department is helping participants from universities and schools to identify wild bee nests in specially designed educational nesting aids using a specially developed identification app and thus become part of a participatory research environment.

The wild bee project is concerned with how awareness of biodiversity can be promoted in education with the help of a wild bee identification app and how this tool can be used for wild bee monitoring in the sense of a citizen science approach and established at schools and universities in the context of research-based learning. The aim is to collect and document data on the way of life and distribution of wild bees. In order to ensure cooperation between universities and schools, a wide range of accompanying training courses were developed and participants were connected via a digital course platform.

On February 25, 2025, 25 new project locations - including a Swedish university and two Indonesian universities - were introduced to the Citizen Science project. The focus was on the ecology, morphology and diversity of wild bees and wasps that will nest in the nesting aid. The participants also dealt with research questions that can be investigated during the course of the project. Further training to introduce the digital identification tool is planned for May 7, 2025.

On February 26, 2025, the training was aimed at advanced participants who were already part of the project in 2024. In addition to an exchange of experiences, the participants presented the sustainable projects already planned and implemented in the educational institutions that were initiated as a result of their participation in the project. The advanced participants were also guided through three trophic levels in the complex miniature “nesting aid” ecosystem - from the plants to the wild bees to their antagonists, the parasites.