The Great Sunflower Project

By Joanne White, Fork & Bottle

Gretchen LeBuhn, an associate professor at San Francisco State, has launched The Great Sunflower Project. It's a community science project which has a goal to look at the health of local bees and how pollination both wild and garden are being affected. As you may know, there is great concern about the bee population in the US, and this project is targeting bees to see how they are doing nationwide.

To join the project, they ask you to plant a native sunflower (and they will send you seeds) and then twice a month watch a sunflower to see how long it takes for 5 bees to visit that one flower. The information should help them get a picture of how bees are being affected (and what state they are in) in the hopes of setting a plan to help them. If you don't have a garden, the website also lists public gardens where you can observe bees.