Bee friendly apps for your smartphone
Tom Coupe
12 September 2012
As summer flowers fade, I'm looking at my dull patio and dreaming of a garden stuffed full of flowers next spring.
Suprisingly it's two new phone apps that have got me in Titchmarsh mode.
The first is Pooter, a brilliant citizen science project dressed up as a super-trumps style bee-off you can compete in with friends. Take a good snap of a bumble bee (harder than it sounds), match it against an in-app field guide, then poot it. The bee-brainiacs at Pooter HQ then double check your work. I thought I had found a rare tree-bee but I lost 100 points when my pic got 'dis-pooted'. Like an army of smartphone owning worker-bees (or is that ants?) people are going out around the country and gathering data on bee populations to be crunched into hard science. Loads of fun and it's got me looking much more closely at exactly which fuzzy critters are landing on the echinacea and honeysuckle flowers currently on offer in my back garden.
The second app that has got my green fingers itching is Pollinator. It's a platform game (very) loosely based on The Terminator films, a robo-bee sent back from the future to save it's species from insect Armageddon. I think my daughter is going to love it, although she's too young to absorb the cleverly intertwined advice on how to support bees in your area. It's been launched by The Co-Op's Plan Bee campaign and looks like a great way to get young people to soak up some truths about why we need to help provide for bees in our back gardens. It worked on me anyway.
So there you have it. Two simple apps to get you thinking about bees. After all British bees are in trouble - three species are nearly extinct, and we need to do all we can to protect them.
The big question is can I really face digging up that paving? Perhaps if I just pull up a few slabs that will force me to me finish the job, hmm...
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