Climate Leaves a Mark: How AI and Museum Collections Reveal Global Bee Adaptations

What do museum drawers and deep learning have in common? In our new paper published in Functional Ecology, we show that together, they can help uncover how bees have adapted to climates around the world.

The study, a collaboration between the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Kansas, leveraged high-resolution images of preserved bee specimens from both institutions' bee collections. By training convolutional neural networks to measure hair coverage (pilosity) and body lightness from over 600 bee species, the team was able to quantify complex morphological traits that are often too time-consuming or inconsistent to capture manually.

The findings are striking: bees from hot, arid environments, especially deserts, tend to be both hairier and lighter in color. These traits likely help bees manage heat stress through increased reflectance and insulation, providing strong support for ecogeographical rules like the thermal melanism hypothesis and Gloger’s Rule. Deserts, the study finds, are hotspots for bees adapted to extreme conditions, echoing patterns seen in plants and other animals.

This work wouldn’t have been possible without digitized natural history collections. Museum specimens provide a time-stamped, spatially explicit archive of biodiversity that, when paired with modern computer vision tools, enable large-scale ecological and evolutionary insights. The collaboration with KU's Entomology Collection was essential in expanding the dataset’s taxonomic and geographic reach.

As conservationists race to understand how pollinators will respond to climate change, this study shows the power of combining historical specimens with modern AI. It’s a compelling reminder that the future of conservation may lie not only in the field—
but also in the museum.

Read the full paper: Ostwald et al. 2025, Functional Ecology

Microscopic Portraits of Native Bees on Display at UCSB Library

A new exhibit at the UC Santa Barbara Library invites visitors to explore the intricate beauty of California’s native bees through high-resolution images produced by the Big-Bee project at UC Santa Barbara. Curated by entomologist Katja Seltmann, the exhibit reveals the rich structural diversity of bee wings, hairs, and other features that are often invisible to the naked eye.

Photo Credit: Harrison Tasoff

These striking images are not merely artistic — they are scientific records. Each was generated as part of a recent study published in Functional Ecology (Ostwald et al., 2025) by the Big-Bee lab, which used detailed morphological data to examine how bee body form relates to ecological function.

By presenting these data-driven visuals in a gallery setting, the exhibit bridges taxonomic research and visual culture, expanding how we engage with biodiversity and inviting new audiences to connect with the science behind species conservation.

The exhibit is free and open to the public at the UCSB Library until the end of June, 2025.