Dear Friends,
We have had another great year of gathering important information about pollinators and protecting habitat. Our data is being used to make decisions about key areas needing pollinator conservation and to evaluate pesticide use. Our protocol has become a model for other citizen science projects around the world.
I want to take this moment to recognize that this project is really about you. You make the effort to collect the critical data need to help our pollinators and you are the folks taking the steps to improve your yards, gardens and public spaces to make them better homes for our native bees, butterflies and other pollinators. Thank you for all your work.
To honor and thank those of you who have joined the Great Sunflower Project, we spent the last year designing our own take on a baseball card, the Bee All Stars.These are a set of baseball style cards to help you learn how to identify the bees that you are seeing in your gardens. 
Once you are logged in, you can download them here. It takes a couple minutes because there are lots of pictures so, don't worry! Once you have downloaded them, just cut them in half, fold them over and you have a two-sided card with photos on the front and information on the back. I just printed a couple sets and laminated them for the teachers at our elementary school. We will eventually make these available to purchase if you don't want to make your own.
We are hoping this will get you excited about continuing to participate in 2015. We’d love to get more gardens revved up to support bees by running through our garden checklist at the Great Habitat Challenge and of course, more pollinator counts.
For those of you interested in supporting our work, you can donate to the Great Sunflower Project here or send a check to the address below. The online form is a bit clunky as it goes through the University. To make sure your gift gets to the Great Sunflower Project, choose “donate to other” when it gets to the “About Your Gift” section and then tell them you want it to go to the Great Sunflower Project.
As always, we are so grateful for your participation. Have a wonderful holiday.
Gretchen
The Queen Bee
Great Sunflower Project
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Ave.
San Francisco, CA 94132