While evidence of insect pollinator declines accumulates, little is known about the pollinator communities that are most vulnerable to population fluctuations and may require conservation actions. Among the main reasons for this lack of knowledge about the status and trends of native pollinators are the time, cost, and expertise required to collect and identify wild insect pollinators (bees, more specifically). Here, we discuss how leveraging the complementarity of community science and taxonomist expertise can help overcome these challenges and provide perspective and insights from launching the large‐scale monitoring program Abeilles citoyennes . The overall objective of this community science project is to monitor wild bee (Apoidea) and hover fly (Syrphidae) diversity in the province of Quebec, Canada, and study the effects of landscape composition on their communities. From 2019 to 2021, 131 volunteers collected insects at 161 sites across the province. A total of 13,558 bees and 2,486 hover flies were collected and identified to species. The project protocol and potential data uses are presented, along with a discussion of the benefits and challenges of using an expert‐assisted community science approach for pollinator monitoring and opportunities for improvement.

Mass media plays an important role in the construction and circulation of risk perception associated with animals. Widely feared groups such as spiders frequently end up in the spotlight of traditional and social media. We compiled an expert-curated global database on the online newspaper coverage of human-spider encounters over the past ten years (2010–2020). This database includes information about the location of each human-spider encounter reported in the news article and a quantitative characterisation of the content—location, presence of photographs of spiders and bites, number and type of errors, consultation of experts, and a subjective assessment of sensationalism. In total, we collected 5348 unique news articles from 81 countries in 40 languages. The database refers to 211 identified and unidentified spider species and 2644 unique human-spider encounters (1121 bites and 147 as deadly bites). To facilitate data reuse, we explain the main caveats that need to be made when analysing this database and discuss research ideas and questions that can be explored with it.

Diel patterns in foraging activity are dictated by a combination of abiotic, biotic and endogenous limits. Understanding these limits is important for insects because ectotherm taxa will respond more pronouncedly to ongoing climatic change, potentially affecting crucial ecosystem services. We leverage an experimental macrocosm, the Montreal Insectarium Grand Vivarium, to test the importance of endogenous mechanisms in determining temporal patterns in foraging activity of butterflies. Specifically, we assessed the degree of temporal niche partitioning among 24 butterfly species originating from the Earth's tropics within controlled environmental conditions. We found strong niche overlap, with the frequency of foraging events peaking around solar noon for 96% of the species assessed. Our models suggest that this result was not due to the extent of cloud cover, which affects radiational heating and thus limits body temperature in butterflies. Together, these findings suggest that an endogenous mechanism evolved to regulate the timing of butterfly foraging activity within suitable environmental conditions. Understanding similar mechanisms will be crucial to forecast the effects of climate change on insects, and thus on the many ecosystem services they provide.