Knowing the plant is there is useful. What it’s doing today matters too.
There’s loads of heather near me. Or bramble. Ivy. Clover. Lime. Whatever happens to be locally important.
Knowing that a useful forage plant occurs around an apiary is important. It tells us something about opportunity. The next step is to ask whether that opportunity is active now.
A lovely UK example comes from two years of honey DNA metabarcoding in Wales. Researchers detected 120 plant taxa in honey, but only 16 had a high relative read abundance across the main foraging months. They also found that only a small proportion of the flowering genera available in the landscape were used strongly by the honeybees. Bramble, white clover and ivy were among the important plants that appeared in that particular seasonal picture.
That’s one reason why Apiary Forecast treats plant evidence as opportunity rather than proof of collection. The Plant Atlas evidence can tell you a plant is recorded nearby. Your own observation might even tell you there’s an entire hillside of it. The seasonal timing and weather then help answer the more interesting question: how much use are the bees likely to be making of that opportunity now?
We use Hopkin’s phenology principles together with the Plant Atlas data, our own proprietary Bee Bible, and the weather to produce a more accurate rendering of the likelihood of forage based on all of these pieces working together.
Take a look at the Pollen and Nectar Outlooks for your apiary, try the free trial.
A two-year UK honey metabarcoding study detected 120 plant taxa, but only 16 were present at high relative abundance. The researchers also found that honeybees strongly used only a small proportion of the flowering genera available in the surrounding landscape. ‘Present nearby’ and ‘important to the colony right now’ are not the same thing. Sources: Temporal Patterns of Honeybee Foraging in a Diverse Floral Landscape Revealed Using Pollen DNA Metabarcoding of Honey.