Are your bees actually able to use the forage around them?

Most of us have had the same puzzle: there are flowers everywhere, the bees are flying, but the colony still doesn’t seem to be bringing much in.

The reason is that flowers are only the beginning of the story. They need to be producing worthwhile pollen or nectar, and the bees need weather that lets them reach and work them. A dry spell can reduce nectar reward, while wind or showers can make perfectly good forage difficult to use.

Forage Outlook was built to put those pieces together. It combines local plant evidence, seasonal development and current conditions to give a much better picture of what the bees are likely to be able to collect.

Open Forage Outlook

Flowers don’t automatically mean good forage

It’s very easy to look around an apiary, see plenty in flower and assume the colony ought to be doing well.

Unfortunately, flowering doesn’t guarantee a useful reward. Plants that normally provide good nectar can yield poorly during dry weather, and even excellent forage isn’t much use if the bees are struggling to reach it.

The National Bee Unit makes the same point in its feeding guidance: visible flowers don’t necessarily mean that useful nectar is available to the colony. That’s why Forage Outlook isn’t simply a calendar of what ought to be flowering this month. It’s trying to answer something more useful:

What forage is likely to be around, and are the conditions allowing the bees to make worthwhile use of it?

Pollen and nectar tell us different things

Pollen and nectar are both important, but they aren’t interchangeable. Nectar is the colony’s main carbohydrate and energy source, while pollen supplies protein, fats and other nutrients needed for brood rearing and development.

So a hive entrance full of bees carrying pollen is encouraging, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you that nectar intake is good or that stores are increasing.

Forage Outlook keeps pollen potential and nectar support separate before looking at the weather and likely practical intake. That gives a much clearer picture of what the colony may actually be getting.

What forage is likely to be around?

Apiary Forecast uses plant-distribution evidence including Plant Atlas 2020, produced by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland, to help establish which bee-relevant plants are supported in the wider area.

That’s quite different from using a generic flowering calendar, or giving you a tiny list of a few bits of forage. It gives the forecast a real geographical evidence base before seasonal timing and weather are considered.

Are the flowers yielding, and can the bees use them?

These are really two parts of the same problem. 

First, flowering plants need to be offering a worthwhile reward. Forage Outlook considers recent rainfall, time since meaningful rain, shallow-soil moisture and soil temperature to help interpret likely nectar conditions. That becomes particularly useful during prolonged dry weather. The countryside may still look full of flowers while nectar reward has fallen considerably.

Then the bees have to be able to reach and work that forage. Temperature, feels-like temperature, rain, wind, light and cloud all influence how useful the opportunity is in practice.

You can therefore have plenty of forage around but a poor intake outlook because the weather is preventing the bees from making much use of it. Equally, good flying weather doesn’t create nectar where plants are yielding poorly.

That distinction is one of the most useful parts of Forage Outlook. It separates what may be available from what the bees are realistically able to collect.

Gardens, crops and the things only you know about

National plant evidence can tell us a great deal, but it can’t see everything. Gardens, allotments, orchards, flowering crops and deliberately planted pollinator areas can all make a substantial difference to an apiary. Research from the University of Bristol has shown how important gardens can be during periods when nectar becomes scarce elsewhere in the landscape.

The difficulty is that deliberately planted forage is much harder to capture automatically.

That’s why members can add Managed Forage when they know a significant flowering source is nearby. That might be oilseed rape, field beans, borage, phacelia, managed clover, an orchard, a large allotment area or another substantial planting.

I think this is an important part of the approach. Apiary Forecast uses the evidence it can reasonably obtain, while you add the local knowledge that only somebody who actually knows the area can provide.

If a farmer has twenty acres of beans coming into flower beside your bees, you know something the national dataset doesn’t. The sensible thing is to use both.

Local seasons don’t all run to the same timetable

Anyone keeping bees in different parts of the UK soon discovers that spring doesn’t arrive everywhere at once. A sheltered lowland apiary can be well ahead of an exposed coastal or upland site, even when the two aren’t especially far apart.

As I’ve put this tool together, I’ve seen the differences each area of the UK faces. Forage Outlook adjusts seasonal expectations using local factors such as latitude, elevation, east-west position, coastal influence and site exposure.

The aim is to avoid treating Cornwall, Yorkshire, Kintyre and the Highlands as though their seasons all run to the same calendar. That becomes particularly useful around the awkward periods when one group of forage is finishing and the next hasn’t really got going up and down the islands.

The June gap isn’t always in June

The June gap is one of those phrases most beekeepers hear fairly early on.

The basic idea is sound: spring forage can decline before dependable summer sources have properly started, leaving colonies more reliant on their existing stores. But the timing isn’t fixed. It varies with location, rainfall, seasonal development, local planting and the demands of the colony.

Recent UK research has also shown that forage difficulty can become particularly significant later in the summer, so the hardest period isn’t necessarily confined to June. Forage Outlook uses local seasonal timing and environmental conditions rather than simply turning on a national “June gap” warning because of the date.

Stores Pressure gives you an early warning

Forage becomes especially important when the colony is consuming more than it is bringing in.

A strong colony with plenty of brood can work through stores surprisingly quickly during a poor spell, even when bees are still flying and there appears to be plenty in flower.

Stores Pressure is there to highlight those periods when the wider forage and weather picture suggests that useful intake may be struggling to keep pace. It gives you a reason to look more closely.

That might mean hefting or weighing the hive, considering recent intake, or checking the actual stores when conditions allow.

The National Bee Unit gives similar practical advice, asking beekeepers to consider whether each colony has enough food to reach the next inspection and to take the weather and available forage into account.

A busy entrance can still be misleading

Bees flying strongly doesn’t necessarily mean the colony is gaining weight.

They may be travelling much further for a poor return, gathering pollen while nectar remains weak, or exploiting small amounts of forage that simply don’t keep pace with what the colony is using.

University of Sussex research using waggle-dance information has shown how far honey bees can travel when useful forage becomes harder to find, with much greater foraging distances at difficult points in the season.

So entrance activity is useful evidence, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Forecast your own apiary

Forage information becomes much more useful when it is tied to where your bees actually are.

Members can save up to three private apiary locations within their supported Apiary Forecast area. Each saved apiary uses a forage area of roughly five miles radius, around 78.5 square miles, while the weather interpretation is centred much more closely on the apiary itself.

That gives the forecast a better starting point than simply asking what conditions are like around the nearest town.

Your saved locations remain private to your account, and coordinates are stored at reduced precision for privacy.

The evidence behind Forage Outlook

The forage approach draws on recognised UK plant, pollinator and beekeeping evidence, including Plant Atlas 2020, National Bee Unit guidance, research from the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the RHS Plants for Pollinators programme and work from British universities including Sussex and Bristol.

If you want to go deeper into the evidence and modelling, there is more on The Science Behind Apiary Forecast.

So what does Forage Outlook actually tell you?

It brings together what forage is likely to be around, how supportive the conditions are for nectar, whether the bees can get to and work it, and whether the overall picture suggests useful intake or increasing pressure on stores.

You can then combine that with what you know about the colony and anything significant nearby that you’ve added through Managed Forage.

The aim is simple:

Are my bees actually getting enough from what’s around them?

Open Forage Outlook

See what Forage Outlook says for your apiary

If you haven’t tried Apiary Forecast before, you can try it free for two weeks.

You’ll also have access to the wider Apiary Forecast tools for inspection weather, colony management, Apiary Visit, queen mating and day-to-day hive priorities.

No payment details are required for the trial.

Further UK guidance and evidence

National Bee Unit, To Feed or Not to Feed?
Guidance on feeding and forage, including the distinction between visible flowers and useful nectar.
Read the National Bee Unit guidance

National Bee Unit, Feeding Bees: pollen and substitutes
Guidance on the importance of pollen to colony development.
Read the NBU pollen guidance

British Beekeepers Association, The Beekeeping Year
Seasonal guidance covering forage, stores and colony management.
Read BBKA’s Beekeeping Year guidance

BSBI, Plant Atlas 2020
Modern plant-distribution evidence for Britain and Ireland.
Read the Plant Atlas 2020 summary

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, National Honey Monitoring Scheme
Research using honey samples from British beekeepers to investigate which plants honey bees are using.
Read about the National Honey Monitoring Scheme

Royal Horticultural Society, Plants for Pollinators
Evidence and guidance on plants providing pollen and nectar to British pollinators.
Read RHS Plants for Pollinators

University of Sussex
Research into honey-bee foraging effort and periods when nectar becomes harder to obtain.
Read the University of Sussex research

University of Bristol
Research into the contribution of gardens to seasonal nectar availability.
Read the University of Bristol research