A single flower-rich garden is a lifeboat, not a lifeline. Most bees, hoverflies and other pollinators can only travel a limited distance between refuelling stops before running out of energy. When patches of habitat sit in a landscape of bare, flowerless ground — mown verges, arable monocultures, tarmac — the gaps between them can be wider than a pollinator's safe foraging range, cutting a population off from the rest of the landscape even if good habitat exists nearby. A forage corridor is a continuous or "stepping-stone" strip of flowering plants that closes that gap.
Many solitary bee species forage within only 100–300m of their nest — far less than a honeybee's several kilometres — which is why hedgerows, road verges and field margins sown with wildflowers matter so much for connecting fragmented countryside habitat.
A 3D landscape of flowering habitat patches spaced along a winding line, linked — or not — by a forage corridor whose coverage you control, with bees attempting to cross the gaps between patches.
Crossing success depends on the flowerless distance a pollinator must fly on stored energy alone: wider patch spacing lowers it, while a fuller forage corridor shortens the effective gap and raises the odds of a successful crossing.
Set patch spacing and corridor coverage, choose how many patches sit in the landscape, and watch bees fly out from the hive patch — green trails mark successful crossings, red trails mark bees that turn back partway. Try dragging corridor coverage to 0% and then back up to see the outcome flip.
Many solitary bee species forage within just 100–300m of their nest, so a single mown, flowerless verge can functionally isolate a whole population from a nearby meadow — even one still within sight.