IDmyBee is here!

Hi everyone!

It's been almost a year since we presented the idea of IDmyBee at the first meeting of the GDR POLLINECO in south of France. With Bertrand Schatz, and with the help of a master student in systematics and evolution, Elie Saliba, and the generosity of Andrew Polaszek who graciously shared his unpublished genus key, we are thrilled to introduce you to this brand new website, the online platform of IDmyBee, and a first version of the online identification key to the genera of european wild bees, IDmyBee-genera!

The website is brand new and there is certainly much room for improvement, but it is out so you can benefit from what is already done. Also we want it to be a collaborative project, so please contact us if you have suggestions or if you want to join the team to contribute directly to the development of the platform.

Among other things, in the coming months we plan to:

- Add a list of the online ressources with information for the different genera (Atlas Hymenoptera, WestPalBees, Palearctic Osmiine Bees). There is already plenty of resources out there and it would be nice for someone identifying a genus to have a good view of what's known about it in a few clicks. But that demands a bit more work.
- Start a list of the current and active taxonomists in Europe, and the naturalists knowledgeable on the different groups.
- Add a tutorial for Xper3, the software used for the IDmyBee online tools to help identification. It is quite intuitive, but a little help may be useful. Currently, the tool is available only online, but we are discussing with the developers to enable an offline version.
- Add a webpage to illustrate our progress towards the different goals of IDmyBee and the different groups of bees.
- Add pdf availability for the documents cited in the bibliography.
- Translate the IDmyBee-genera tool and the website in french.
Why french? Because this project started in France and because... we speak french. We currently lack the contacts and resources to do so for other languages yet, but that's definitely part of the long-term goals.

We are also currently actively working on the development of the IDmyBee - Melittidae workpackage, to facilitate identification and access to taxonomic information of european Melittidae, with Denis Michez and Mathieu Lachaise.

So this is just a start, and we hope you'll join us to develop this project into a working platform facilitating the study of wild bees in Europe.

Adrien, for the team of IDmyBee