Budding bumblebee enthusiasts are being encouraged to submit photographs to aid attempts to stem the decline in the species throughout the UK.
BeeWatch is an online project, led by the University of Aberdeen, that has already had more than 9,000 photographs submitted by members of the public.
A new online training tool allows them to identify the bees.
The project is aimed at creating a clearer picture of the distribution of bees around the country.
Such "crowdsourcing" presently accounts for only 5% of bumblebee submissions and project leaders hope this could be increased to almost half.
Dr Advaith Siddharthan, from the university's school of computing science, said: "To have crowdsourcing as an operational part of a monitoring programme is a world first.
"BeeWatch is, we think, unique in terms of having a statistical model for putting together IDs by different members of the public and estimating the likelihood of their consensus being correct."
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