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BeeMapper: A Tool Used by Maine Wild Blueberry Farmers

    

Did you know that Maine is home to 42,000 acres of commercially-managed wild blueberries?

Like the name, wild blueberries are not a planted crop. They are a native plant managed by commercial farmers and landowners. Humans have managed wild blueberries (also known as lowbush blueberries) for thousands of years. Today, 485 Maine farmers and landowners manage wild blueberry lands and all of them rely on bees for pollination. While some bees are commercially managed honey bees, native pollinators require supportive habitat for food and shelter all year.

BeeMapper is an interactive tool developed by researchers at the University of Maine to help farmers estimate the levels of native pollinators in their fields and surrounding landscapes.

The tool displays the land cover and predicted wild bee abundance in the Maine landscape where wild blueberry production occurs. It is designed to help farmers better understand the habitat needs of native pollinators and help the bees thrive in agricultural fields and field edges.

Information from BeeMapper can help farmers:

  1. Determine the placement of honey bee hives during blueberry pollination.
  2. Establish a pollinator conservation plan for particular crop fields.
  3. Understand wild bee communities across different land types.

The BeeMapper User’s Guide offers instructions on how to use the tool, interpret the data, and plan wild bee conservation and management actions.

This web-based tool was developed in 2017 at the University of Maine by an interdisciplinary team including Dr. Frank Drummond, Dr. Cynthia Loftin, Dr. Samuel Hanes, Robert Powell, and Brianne Du Clos. Development of BeeMapper was generously supported by the University of Maine, the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, the Northeast Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program, the USGS Maine Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, and the Wild Blueberry Commission of Maine.

Information provided by University of Maine