Native Bee Monitoring Volunteers

Are you interested in earning hours towards your Master Naturalist certification by walking through a beautiful garden and observing bees? 🌻🐝🌻

We are looking for volunteers to come at least once/month (or more May-August) to monitor bees and on each visit to photograph and film bee activity and log those observations on iNaturalist. We expect volunteers to work alone or in pairs and walk slowly through the garden to monitor for bee activity while taking detailed field notes. This opportunity is open February - November with a two-month downtime in December-January while bees are less active. 

Volunteers must have a smart phone or camera which to take high quality photos or videos of bees and must have an active iNaturalist profile they are willing to regularly upload photos to correct geolocations to be auto added to our active projects on iNaturalist. 

If you are qualified and interested, please email lindsay.loftin@austintexas.gov to register. We request a 1-program year commitment from each volunteer so that you can deeply learn the garden and the bees who live here and share higher quality images and observational data which come from practice and experience. 

This is where you can log your hours for training, monitoring, outreach work that you do throughout the year. All volunteer work must be done during regular garden gate hours unless pre-approved by garden staff. To do so, please select "Add Impact" and log your hours there. Do NOT register for this event as it will not count as logged hours.

If visiting Zilker Botanical Garden as your site, please check in with gate staff to let them know you are here to volunteer as part of the bee monitoring project. Thank you for volunteering!