Bee occurrence data collected in citizen science program “Hanamaru-Maruhana national census” in Japan

To understand bee distributions in Japan, we started citizen science program “Hanamaru-Maruhana national census (Bumble bee national census in English)” from 2013, and collected bee photographs taken by citizens. Bee photographs were collected via e-mail or “Mobile Phone System and Cloud Services” provided by Fujitsu FIP, Co. Species were identified from photographic images, and latitude-longitude data was extracted from GPS data in Exif information of photographs or address in text of e-mail. We have confirmed all 16 bumble bee species inhabiting in the Japanese archipelago excluding the Kurile Islands, and have got 5,503 records of these bumble bees. In addition, we have got 380 records of three carpenter bee species that are often mistaken for bumble bees by citizens. This occurrence data covers the time range from September 2006 to October 2018, the latitudinal range from 26.45 to 45.29, and the longitudinal range from 127.80 to 145.82. The latitude-longitude data was rounded off to two decimal places in the published dataset for protecting privacy rights of citizens. In addition, the latitude-longitude data of five rare bumble bee species/subspecies was rounded off to one decimal place for protecting their habitats. The complete data set for this abstract published in the Data Paper section of the journal is available in electronic format in MetaCat in JaLTER at http://db.cger.nies.go.jp/JaLTER/metacat/metacat/ERDP-2021-04.1/jalter-en.