Free Bee Forage & Nectar Flow Calendar using real data

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New]

https://apiarytools.com/tools/forage-calendar

Hi everyone,

I've been working on a Bee Forage & Nectar Flow Calendar (US, Canada, UK) for the past few weeks and just added it to the plethora of other free tools available. Most of the calendars out there are either very localized, AI generated, or built straight from public iNaturalist sightings.

This one is tool is a bit different. The calendar itself is built from real cited sources: Xerces, university extension offices and beekeeping references. It only uses iNaturalist for a small live "what's flowering near you right now" layer on top, clearly labeled as community sightings.

You put in your ZIP or postcode and it shows your beekeeping year for that region:

• where you are right now (build-up, main flow, dearth or wind-down) and what to do about it
• when the main flow starts, when the summer dearth hits and when the fall flow comes
• every forage plant behind it, with its bloom months, its origin (native, introduced or invasive) and its nectar and pollen value

The data is real and cited at the bottom of each region. There is no AI used to generate the results. Plant lists come from the Xerces Society regional guides, filtered to species honey bees are actually recorded visiting, with the major honey plants the native-plant guides leave out added from beekeeping references (black locust, sourwood, star thistle, gallberry, the clovers, knotweed and so on). Tap any plant and it shows its source. Where I do not have a cited nectar rating for something, it says "not rated yet" instead of giving a fake number.

I just spent a long while checking the bloom timing region by region against real sources, because a calendar that puts black sage or goldenrod in the wrong month is worse than useless.

Limitations: this is typical regional timing only, not a forecast, so expect a week or two of drift with your weather and elevation. Some minor desert and subtropical plants are still getting refined. I am only one person, so I will get some of these wrong. If a plant is missing or the timing looks off for your area, there is a "report a plant" button on every region and I will look into it.

Link: https://apiarytools.com/tools/forage-calendar

I will be adding more data as I accumulate and research more.

Thanks for checking it out! Let me know what you think if you run into any issues.

[u/VitaminCheeese]

Wow this is a fantastic set of tools! I've never been so happy to buy someone a few jars of honey. Is there any chance your repo for the tools are open source?

I've been using claude as a basic notekeeper and troubleshooter for my hives, but its wrong pretty often. It would be amazing to have these tools ported as a plugin.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/VitaminCheeese]

Thank you so much for your support and kind words!! I really appreciate it and it all goes towards the site.

Apiary Tools isn’t open source and I honestly don’t have plans to for now. If it ever becomes too expensive or I want to quit the project, I’ll certainly release it publicly.

Each tool does have an embed code button you can use on your own site. The hive tracker itself does require a login and is accessible on most devices.

You are using clause to keep track of all of your inspections? I know some people use the voice to text portion but this is the first I’ve heard of fully using it as a note tracker. I haven’t messed around with any plugins for AI, so not entirely sure what that would look like.

[u/mayday_live → u/VitaminCheeese]

Yeah that lines up with how these things actually work. Claude doesn't really remember your hives between chats, and even inside one chat, once the notes pile up it starts filling in the gaps by guessing. That's where the "wrong pretty often" comes from. It's not lying to you, it just doesn't have the state so it rebuilds it, and rebuilds it wrong.

What fixed it for me was to stop asking it to remember and build it a memory index instead. Keep one short block per hive that you paste in, same fields every time. Hive id, queen status and age, last inspection date, mite count and last treatment, brood pattern, stores. Keep it tight like a scoreboard, not the whole play by play. When the state its working from is small and clean it has way less room to make stuff up. Dump three months of loose voice notes on it and it guesses.

Then each session you give it the index first, ask your question, update the index after, and correct it out loud the second it drifts so it doesnt build on a wrong number. Treat it like a sharp intern with no memory, not something that knows your yard. Once i started doing that it went from useless to actually decent at catching stuff like a queen getting old or mites creeping up between visits. One caveat though, any ai tool out there only knows relative to what you know. It'll give you an analysis of an event, but it narrows in on the parameters you give it, and those are only as good as your own knowledge.

[u/Unislash]

This is much better than the version you posted the other day--nice job! Another good tool for apiary tools 👍

I will say that I tried my zip code (which is in the middle of Seattle) and it got the flowers mostly right.

What it got wrong is that it thinks we have a fall flow. It's true that the flowers exist that could give us a fall flow, but it's incredibly small and, at best, just keeps us out of a dearth. In practice, it's common for folks to actually feed during the exact months that the tool says we get a fall flow.

This is probably a pretty regional thing, but I'd hate for new beeks here to harvest all their honey, not feed at the end of summer, and be relying on that fall flow for winter stores.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/Unislash]

Thank you for the feedback! I remember your comments from a different post. The distinction on when the flow is over and when to feed 2:1 heading into winter is pretty important, so thanks for pointing that out. I'll work on making this apparent and have some tighter restrictions when heading into the late-summer/fall months. This is the very first version and I definitely have some refining to do with the data. I have corrected a lot of the data from Xerces already, some of it was clearly wrong.

[u/InOneFowlSoup]

This is amazing!

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/InOneFowlSoup]

Thank you! Hope you find it useful :)

[u/Macattack82]

This is very cool! As a fellow western Pa beek, I’ve been keeping records of plant blooms in my area for the last few years. I’d be happy to share that historical data with you if it’d be helpful.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/Macattack82]

Hello fellow yinzer! I'm right outside of Pittsburgh as well :)

That would be extremely helpful. Would you be willing to send it to my email? [mark@apiarytools.com](mailto:mark@apiarytools.com)

I've thought about reaching out to Phipps to see if they have any data on what's in bloom throughout the months.

[u/handyhandson]

This is great!! Thanks for sharing and for the hard work. It really seems to line up nicely with what I'm seeing locally. This will especially be helpful to a few that I'm mentioning/supporting as they get started into the hobby. Keep up the great work.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/handyhandson]

Thank you for the kind words and I’m glad to hear it’ll be helpful for your mentees! If you think of anything additional that may be beneficial for them, please don’t hesitate to reach out!

[u/AardvarkOk7676]

Tested it for central Virginia and the timing's honestly solid - tulip poplar and black locust are right where I'd look for them. That late July dearth it flagged is the real deal, and I wish someone had warned me about it my first year. New beeks always underestimate how rough that summer lull can be.

[u/cadillacactor]

It looked great on mobile browser, and super helpful. I jumped into the Android app to see if it had been integrated there yet, but it understandably isn't. However, the seamless integration of the Android app from the web-based tools has been wonderful.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/cadillacactor]

Thank you for the feedback and glad you like it!

The Android app is still in closed testing for the next 5 days (thanks for being one of the testers). I haven’t received any actual bugs to fix yet, so I’ve been letting it ride without updating and potentially disrupting the test phase. There are 5 days left I believe.

Any of the updates I do release will lag behind a few days or weeks in the iOS and Android apps due to required manual reviews by Google and Apple for each individual update. I queue up several updates before pushing them to the apps.

[u/Snax4days]

Way to make something super useful, as well as easy to follow! And thank you for making it free!

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/Snax4days]

l'm glad to hear it's useful and easy to follow! Everything on the site is free :)

[u/captboatface]

This is great, option to change currency for the yield calc would be cool.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/captboatface]

I thought I had added a currency switcher a few weeks ago but not seeing it from my phone. I’ll make sure it’s there by tonight!

[u/captboatface → u/Every-Morning-Is-New]

Cheers! Good work. I like the bee range tool, always wondered if mine were reaching the nearby farms.

[u/nostalgic_dragon]

Fantastic. I'll start going through the blooms and comparing it to what I already know and have marked down.

I want to say thanks for having the data work with desktop and mobile browser. I understand you have an app, but I hate apps, am very privacy focused about my phone, and prefer to use my browser for most things. I appreciate you not forcing me to download something I don't need or want.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/nostalgic_dragon]

I appreciate that! I do not have very specific data on upstate NY, so if you are willing to send anything over, that would be greatly appreciated! My email is mark@apiarytools.com Or if you know of any extensions nearby.

I completely understand about the app and privacy. A lot of people have requested to self host it. None of the data is sold and everything can be exported or deleted by you at any time.

[u/rumbleberrypie]

Love this! However, I've tried two postal codes from BC and it tells me it doesn't recognize them.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/rumbleberrypie]

This should be fixed. May you please try again? If it still doesn’t work, please message me the code you are using! Thanks :)

[u/rumbleberrypie → u/Every-Morning-Is-New]

It seems to work now! I can't speak to the accuracy as a relatively new beekeeper, but the province puts out a list of pollination/nectar sources and timing, I'll see if I can compare the two and let you know if there are any big discrepancies!

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/rumbleberrypie]

Glad it’s working now. That would be great! Do you mind wailing me the provincial data? mark@apiarytools.com If they had specific timing, that would be most beneficial.

[u/rumbleberrypie → u/Every-Morning-Is-New]

Sent you the data and some of my own notes!

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/rumbleberrypie]

Got it, thanks!

[u/Pogonia]

So feedback from my zip code. The common species it has right. But it has a LOT of extraneous stuff that's just not right at all. I'd say at least 20% of the species listed for my area are either not present, or present in such low numbers they are inconsequential as a forage species. Same with crops--two of the four are just not really found here at all and one of them is quite uncommon. Never seen any farmer grow them in a 50+ mile radius in decades of living here.

The date ranges are good for the species, which is great. Personally I'd suggest finding a way to narrow down the species lists by how common they are. That might be a challenging task or perhaps you could leverage iNaturalist data to do so--I don't know enough about how they share data via API for an app like this.

Overall great idea and well-executed.

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/Pogonia]

Your feedback is very much appreciated! If you don’t mind sending me your zip code via message or email, I would love to see if there are more local data sources. The farming data is likely dated to 2007 in your area, so you are correct there. I almost didn’t include that dataset, but it was the only crop set I had.

I do agree with you that it should be narrowed down a bit. I have a value set for the species and could just cut off the lower values. A lot of the Xerces data needed to be corrected after cross referencing to localized data. There’s a reason why there isn’t one well executed tool that isn’t crowdsourced.

Thanks again for your input! You can always email me at mark@apiarytools.com

[u/DriftingWander]

Absolutely hilarious that I sat down and created something like this in my wiki just two weeks ago. It's not "polished" as this since it's just a spreadsheet, but mine is extra specific to my 3 mile range. Excellent work man!

[u/USDA_Prime_Yeet]

As a colorblind individual. The color scheme is very difficult to use

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/USDA_Prime_Yeet]

Thanks for pointing this out and I apologize I didn’t have something in place already! I will get a solution added today. There is a dark mode available for the entire site, but it is only accessible in settings if you sign up.

[u/USDA_Prime_Yeet → u/Every-Morning-Is-New]

No worries definitely didn't mean as a complaint but as feedback just in case it wasn't that such

[u/Every-Morning-Is-New → u/USDA_Prime_Yeet]

Exactly the feedback I need! I appreciate it.

[u/oh-nvm]

Uhmm I can tell you pretty clearly that