Photo: Alex Wild
UT student Arya Vyas is the winner of our 2026 Spring Bee Competition! She observed the mason bee At 2:11 pm on 2/12/2026 in the flower beds at the Littlefield fountain. You can view the iNat observation here.
Arya won a $25 gift card to the local bookstore Book People.
Rationale: One measure of our changing climate is the shifting dates of emergence of our earliest spring flowers and insects. As Texas warms, some of our local bees may start emerging earlier in the year. The Biodiversity Center encourages you to help keep watch for the first bee activity of the year.
Osmia are robust metallic blue/green bees that provision mud nests with pollen to raise their offspring, and they are among the first seasonally-active spring insects around Austin. They are easily seen on redbuds, mountain laurel, and other early blooming trees.
Identification Resources:
https://bugguide.net/node/view/14967
Eligibility: Those who submit each year to our contest must be formally affiliated as student, faculty, staff, volunteer, or alumnus with the UT College of Natural Sciences to participate.
The submissions must:
- Be either a collected physical specimen, or a photograph in sufficient detail to be identified, taken in Travis County, Texas, in 2026. If posted to iNaturalist, the submission must be by the photographer, and the image must be identifiable.
- Be of a bee in the genus Osmia.
- Accompanied with specific data about the time and date of collection, geographic (latitude/longitude) coordinates in decimal degrees to 3 decimal places, your name, and a current email address.
The winning entry is judged by UT Entomology Curator Alex Wild as the entry received with the earliest chronological time and date of collection and observation, as indicated by field notes or photographic metadata.
