The feedback about the Swarm Outlook was pretty good, yes it has limits as it can’t peer into your hive, but it paved the way for the next set of tools. Inspection Outlook and Forage.
These were built in fairly short order as I already has the bulk of the framework done. And I’m not going to pretend it was easy or well-organised, it wasn’t. But it wasn’t as bad as writing down plans on the back of a fag packet. I was just a bit more organised than that.
I still hadn’t answered my own question about the June Gap and needed to hunker down and do some research. Proper research, not rEsUrcH.
I found a multitude of flora information on availability around the UK, but as I was mainly looking at Kintyre I focused on west-coast Celtic/Atlantic rain forest options as well as machair, coastal plants and of course, the usual urban, suburban, village end, forest rides scrub.
These all had broad entries, with flowering information, and there was well over 3000 species. I had to narrow it down to those species that were bee-friendly.
Meanwhile, I managed to “finish” Inspection Outlook. It was good and I thought it was finished. But as I later found out, it wasn’t finished by any stretch of the imagination. However, it looked good, and it worked.
I built into that the rule-sets of the National Bee Unit around inspection at various temperatures and the conditions bees preferred. I personally found this very useful as sometimes you do take a chance with inspections. This has probably saved my colonies several times now over the last few weeks. Call me melodramatic if you want, but showers here can blow over or hit hard, and temperatures are marginal at best. Inspection Outlook was a good reminder to heed the warning.
