BeeMachine 4+

I adore this app. I take photos of bees for fun, and I want to be able to classify and label them, but I dont have the knowledge and training to do that unaided. I was using a different bug identifier app for a few years, which is very good, but does better at European species than American. So this one has been invaluable!

I love that it’s cautious and gives you a ramble of possibilities - if I have that info, I can go look at BugGuide and figure out which one is most likely, without having to wade through dozens and dozens of bee families to find the right one. It’s even better since they’ve added a wasp filter, because I sometimes struggle to tell the difference with smaller wasps.

I also appreciate this app as a collection keeper - it’s great to be able to quickly reference how many of each type of bee I’ve photographed.

It’s not perfect, of course - I’ve gotten some wild identifications when the photo didn’t have a good angle on whatever the app is looking for. So I do recommend trying a couple different photos if you get an unexpected result. Also, idk if there’s a location component to the ID calculation, but I’ve gotten a few results that, at least officially, don’t live in my area. Of course, bees don’t respect state or national boundaries, so maybe these are accurate - still something to be aware of when using the app.

Even with those minor caveats, this is by far the best bee identifier of any I have tried.

Was very easy to set up and managed to ID four bees in the first ten minutes I had the app! Taking pictures of bees in motion is the hardest part!