Transparency is at the heart of Apiary Forecast

One of the things I care about most with Apiary Forecast is transparency.

Bee weather is complicated enough without missing detail. If the app says a plant, tree or forage group matters to bees, I want our users to be able to understand what that means, why it’s being shown, and whether it’s being treated as a single plant or part of a wider group.

That is why I’ve been doing a detailed tidy-up of Forage Search, also known internally as the Bee Bible. I know, cute right?

You can access this for private saved apiaries, about halfway down the Forage Outlook page.

To help with transparency I’ve made some improvements:

Better search results for real beekeeper language

I’ve improved searches for common terms such as:

Lime linden white clover red clover alsike clover daisy poppy apple pear cherry fruit blossom horse chestnut

But the best bit is that grouped forage sources are clearer

Some forage sources have always been shown as groups because the main outlook display would quickly become unreadable if thousands of plants were listed separately.

For example, these are some of the groups:

Daisies, chamomiles and mayweeds, Fruit blossom, Maples and sycamore, Umbellifers, Thistles and knapweeds, Willowherb, Heather

You get the idea. The grouping is useful, but it needs something else.

So I thought, if a member searches for a group, they should be able to see what’s in that group.

The latest improvement adds a “What is in this group?” transparency layer to Forage Search for Private Saved Apiaries. Apiary Forecast can now show which plants sit inside a grouped source, and which members have local support in the selected area. It also lists plants that are also in that group but may be present elsewhere.

Local forage evidence, not vague national assumptions

We also believe Apiary Forecast is the first bee weather app to incorporate forage information at this level of local accuracy.

That’s a big claim, so I will say it carefully: to the best of our knowledge, we are not aware of another bee weather app combining bee-weather forecasting with this kind of local forage-source evidence and grouped-source transparency. 🤗