Bees seem to cast a spell on the people who watch them. Proving that requires nothing more than a chat with Gretchen LeBuhn, a San Francisco biologist and head of a kind of continent-wide bee census called the Great Sunflower Project.

“I sort of think bees are magical,” she said recently as she contemplated her own, home-grown sunflower. “I like sitting out here with my cup of coffee for 20 minutes, watching bees.”

LeBuhn wants the public’s help with her project, now in its second year. People who visit her Web site can sign up to receive their own packet of sunflower seeds along with instructions on how to observe the bees that show up when the flower has grown.

“As long as the plants are flowering, we ask them to collect data,” LeBuhn said. “Go out and write down the time you start, and write down the time each bee comes up, till you have five bees.”

About 60,000 people in the United States and Canada have signed up so far this year, Le buhn said, 80 to 100 of them from Orange County.

LeBuhn hopes to assemble the results of her survey into a snapshot of how a variety of bee species are doing, and how human influences, such as use of pesticides, are affecting them.

Has there been a decline in European honybees, a non-native but long established species that is critical for crop pollination? And if so, are native bees — bumblebees, carpenter bees, tiny native species that might be mistaken for flies — buzzing in to fill the void?

“The people we love most are the ones who do it once at the beginning of each month and once at the end of each month, as long as they have flowers,” she said.

Try this and you might be struck by the same fascination that’s taken hold of LeBuhn.

“You can tell a fly from a bee because flies have one set of wings on each side, and bees have two wings on each side,” she said. “They hold their body slightly differently.”

LeBuhn, an associate professor of biology at San Francisco State Univeristy, says part of the excitement of the project is sharing what she knows about bees.

“We communicate with people through the email newsletter,” she said. “We give them bits of information, teach them more about the insects in their backyard.”

People who plant sunflowers also can learn a lot on their own.

“Sunflowers are a nice, big canvas,” she said. “You can look at bees that come and stay there a little while. In watching them, you really learn about what’s out there.”

(Photo courtesy Ginny Stibolt)

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