Over the past 20 years there has been increasing awareness of the importance, and vulnerability, of wild bees to pollination in both agricultural and natural habitats. With increased interest in wild bees comes an increased need for training opportunities in bee identification, natural history, and monitoring. Since 1999 “The Bee Course”, a ten-day field and laboratory workshop, has been offered at the Southwestern Research Station in Portal, Arizona. The location of the course, at the junction of the Sonoran desert (to the west) and the Chihuahuan desert (to the east), is a bee biodiversity hotspot with over 500 native bee species. The course emphasizes both field techniques (monitoring and collecting, digging nests, documenting host-plant associations, and photography) and laboratory techniques (making kill jars, pressing plants, dissecting mouthparts and genitalia, identifying bees to genus and species, and specimen-level databasing). The course attracts applicants from diverse backgrounds, including systematics, biodiversity monitoring, ecology, bee-microbe interactions, bee-plant interactions, land management, and conservation. The Bee Course exists thanks to ongoing financial and administrative support from the American Museum of Natural History (NYC) and a dedicated team of instructors from universities and museums around the world. This talk with provide an overview of the history, organization, financing, and impact of the Bee Course over the past 23 years, and our plans for the future.
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