Last Friday I was invited to visit the collections of the American Natural History Museum in New York to look at specimens of wild bees from Southeast Asia. Many of the specimens at AMNH were collected by the earliest bee collectors and taxonomists to visit the region, from around the turn of the 20th century. It was nice to get an idea of what the PSF bee species might look like before going down there (see the photos below)! However, there was an ulterior motive for my visit. Recent advances in machine learning and neural network applications developed at the University of Bonn in Germany could allow for many bee species to be identified just from pictures of their wings in the near future (see the paper here). I only managed to take photos of a small fraction of the SE Asian collection on this visit, but once a reference library is completed, identifying bees collected at Tuanan could be as simple as uploading a picture of a wing...
A side on view of M. alboscopacea, collected in Java, Indonesia
The mean mug of a very old carpenter bee, Xylocopa caerulea, collected in Sarawak, Borneo, in 1900.
Iridescent wings of a female of X. latipes, another carpenter bee. Maybe machine learning may be able to significantly streamline the bee ID process when I start collecting data specimens in Indonesia.
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