2012 Annual Report 1a.Objectives (from AD-416): Complete a comprehensive database of the U.S. National Pollinating Insects Collection, improve search capabilities of the database, and enhance the data access on the internet. This will provide web-based access to researchers in pollination biology, crop pollination, bee systematics, and other scientific disciplines to biological, distributional, and phenological data of the approximately one million specimens of bees in the world. 1b.Approach (from AD-416): Bee specimens in the U.S. National Pollinating Insects Collection will be identified, all label data captured in a relational database, localities georeferenced, species identities and their sex entered. Resulting data will be served through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility portal. 3.Progress Report: Access to information on the floral relationships, seasonality, and distribution of native bees is important for conserving these essential pollinators and for selection of candidate pollinators of crops. Most of this information resides on the labels of individual bee specimens found in museums. This data can be made available by capturing the label data into a relational database, georeferencing the localities, and serving the resulting data on the web. Efforts during the past year resulted in the capture of 20,560 individual specimen records and added 591 new locations. Georeferencing activities yielded an additional 553 localities that can be spatially viewed. This work resulted in a complete record of all sweat bees of the genus Agapostomen and the majority of the Western Hemisphere stingless bees housed in the Pollinating Insect Research Unit’s U. S. National Pollinating Insect Collection. This work represents considerable progress toward the goal of digitizing the entire bee collection.