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Online Guides to North American Bee Identification

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USGS is offering a free tutorial on learning to use Discoverlife online guides to North American bee identification. There will be conference calls web demonstrations on Wednesday, November 29 at 2:00-3:30 Eastern Standard Time and repeated Monday December 4 at 2:00-3:30 Eastern Standard Time. Please click here to register for the session. Please contact Sam Droege (SDroege@usgs.gov) if you wish to be put on a list of announcements related to Native Bee Monitoring or Identification. If you have not used WebEx before, please call in at 1:30 to set up WebEx. There is no charge for the tutorial or for using WebEx or the conference lines, but you will need to make a long distance call to the conference hub. For more information, please contact Sam Droege (SDroege@usgs.gov) 301-497-5840 .

To participate:
• Conference Call: 435-871-6000 PIN 940658#
• WebEx: Go to https://usgs.webex.com/ and join “Bee Identification (Sam Droege)” The software will load automatically, but it may take up to 20 minutes, depending on you connection speed, so it is important to log on early the first time.

There is a great need for individuals who can accurately identify bees for inventory and monitoring programs. Because these guides are unfamiliar to many, we are offer training sessions on their use. A group of us have spent the past 3 years developing web-based identification guides to the bees of North America north of Mexico . At this point we have working guides for all the species east of the Mississippi river (with the exception of Shecodes) with a few guides now covering the entire continent. The guides provide for greater flexibility, speed, and accuracy than traditional dichotomous keys and can be updated easily when names and identification issues change.

We encourage you to look at the Discoverlife Website is located at: www.discoverlife.org and the bee identification portion of that web site is located at: http://www.discoverlife.org/nh/tx/Insecta/Hymenoptera/Apoidea/#Identification before the call.

Conference Call Etiquette
We can host up to 200 people on these calls and hope to have a very interactive session, however, we have had a couple of problems in the past where people begin to talk and don't realize that everyone else can hear them so here are rules.
• The conference call system permits you to mute your phone by hitting *6, meaning that nobody can hear you but you can hear them. Hitting *6 again will unmute the phone. It is best to mute your phone unless you are talking as chair squeaks, typing noises, yawns, and other small noises come across quite well.
• Never put the conference call on hold, as the entire conference call can here whatever whale noises, Musak, or bird calls are played by your telephone and we can't contact you to make you turn it off.

Minimum computer requirements for WebEx are:
• Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, or XP
• Intel x86 (Pentium 400MHZ +) or compatible processor
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, 6, Mozilla 1.6 or later, or Netscape 4.7, 7.x
• JavaScript and cookies enabled in the browser
• 56K or faster Internet connection
Or
• Mac OS 10.2.x or later
• Internet Explorer 5.2 or Safari 1.1 or later
• JavaScript and cookies enabled for the browser
• 56K or faster Internet connection