How do I get my common records accepted as a Bumblebee Conservation Trust volunteer for the common species please? I have been trained to intermediate level and have been doing assisted Beewalks with the Bumblebee Conservation Trust and my own beewalks all year. As bees have a habit of moving it is not always possible to photograph them. I accept that for rare species very specific photographs are needed e.g. brown banded carder bees. For example today I saw 4 bombus terrestris workers - these get booked as bombus terrestris/lucurom due to known difficulty differentiating the workers. Dr Nikki Gammans, Bumblebee Conservation Trust conducted my training. I think that it is unreasonable to have to submit photos all the time - not very energy efficient for the servers either.
Comments
I've just looked at your…
I've just looked at your Hymenoptera records and none of them have been rejected (80 accepted, 719 awaiting verification). Several of them have been flagged as outside known distributions or as hard to ID and will have triggered automatic messages to that effect, but those are just meant to be 'are you sure?' prompts and are not rejections. We've got a bit behind on Hymenoptera verifications for various reasons but more verifiers have recently been recruited and we'll be aiming to catch up - in particular I will be working through records in BBCT project areas, including Nikki's region, so your backlog should shrink!
Are your records definitely being rejected? I tried to have a look for these records to see if the verifier had commented as to why they were being rejected, but all I could find were lots of records that have not yet gone through the verification process. To clarify, for a record to be rejected a verifier has to look at it and then clicked to reject it, so the record would show on your 'My Records' screen with a red cross next to it. This is different to any system messages generated automatically, which might say things like "record outside known coordinates" or for scarcer species "records accepted from known observers, otherwise confirmation from the vice-county recorder needed" etc. These system messages were designed for information only and can basically be ignored.
Bee records are verified by volunteers and there is often quite a delay on the verification, added to which I think records with photos are likely to be verified first because they are easiest to do.
More generally, unfortunately as a verifier (I verify a different group of organisms) you can only judge on the information available on the verification grid, so verifiers probably won't know about your background, it will just be a judgement call whether they think the species being recorded are likely given the time, location etc, at which point they would probably be approved as 'considered correct'.