🌾 Cover Crops as Bee Forage

About this simulation

Arable rotations often leave honey bees with a "June gap" or late-summer dearth once oilseed rape and hedgerow blossom finish. Sowing cover crops — plants grown between cash crops to protect and rebuild soil — can double as a flowering bridge across that gap, so long as species are chosen for overlapping bloom windows rather than a single quick-flowering catch crop.

How it works

• Each plot in the field grid is planted with one species (or left bare) and blooms only within its real-world flowering window.
• Crimson clover blooms in late spring, vetch and phacelia through early-to-mid summer, buckwheat in late summer, and mustard in a short autumn-sown pulse.
• The forage index sums the bloom intensity of every planted plot for the selected month; foraging bees leaving the hive scale with that index.
• A single fast-flowering species leaves long bare stretches; a diverse mix keeps at least one species flowering almost continuously — the core idea behind a "nectar calendar."

Controls

• Month of year — scrub through the season to see which species are in bloom.
• Cover-crop mix — single fast species vs. a diverse four-species blend.
• Field coverage — the share of the field actually sown with cover crop versus left bare stubble.
• Wildflower margins — toggle a permanent flowering field-edge strip that adds a small, steady baseline of forage all year.
• ↺ Replant field — reshuffles which plots get which species. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

UK trials with brassica-legume cover-crop mixes have recorded honey bees and bumblebees foraging on them for six to eight weeks longer than on a single-species stand, while the roots simultaneously reduce soil erosion and add organic matter ahead of the next cash crop.