WebBee - A web-based information system for research on stingless bees

There's a growing awareness on the importance of pollinators for maintaining global biodiversity and for crop production, Stingless bees are a sub-family of insects that arc very important from an environmental and from an economical point of view. Besides their job on pollination in the field they are also being used for pollination inside greenhouses. These insects demand several studies for the understanding of their living habits and also of the influence of both biotic and abiotic factors on their behavior. These studies are essential for determining their role on the environment and their suitability as pollinators for specific crops inside greenhouses. As they are widely disperse in the world researchers from many countries cooperate in these studies and share their findings in many ways. In order to help those studies, organize knowledge and facilitate sharing of information a Web-based information system was proposed and developed. A database is a central part of the system, storing data from different studies. That includes data collected automatically by data loggers and by a weather station in studies on thermoregulation of the colonies, and manually collected data from human observation of their behavior. Data is stored in different formats like texts, photos and videos. The system can be accessed on the Internet with a simple Web browser. It was implemented with a MySQL DBMS, Apache Web server and PHP scripts. This paper provides a description of the system, of the database model developed and of its implementation.