Every apiary sits inside a foraging landscape whose nectar and pollen supply changes block by block and month by month. This model scatters a patchwork of fields, hedgerows, orchards and waste ground around a hive and colours each patch by what it offers a forager this month — then scores the whole landscape the way a surveying beekeeper would: what fraction of patches are actually blooming inside profitable flight range, and how much that value is concentrated in only a few forage types.
Foragers typically prefer sources within 1-2km of the hive because the energy spent flying farther eats into the net calories brought home — a colony surrounded by rich forage at 4km may still starve if nothing blooms within 1km.
A 3D model of the foraging landscape around an apiary: patches of oilseed, orchard, wildflower, bramble and ivy bloom and fade with the calendar while flight-range rings and a live forage score show what a colony can actually reach and use each month.
Forage value depends on three things at once: what's blooming this month, how far it is from the hive, and how diverse the surrounding land use is. The score and gap-risk readout combine all three the way a surveying beekeeper would when siting or auditing an apiary.
Drag the season slider through the year to watch patches bloom and fade, adjust the flight radius and diversity, then toggle quality weighting and gap-only view to see how each factor moves the forage score.
The "June gap" — a dip between spring mass-bloom crops finishing and summer wildflowers starting — is one of the most common forage shortfalls UK beekeepers plan supplemental feeding around.