🌼 Restoring Bee Habitat

About this simulation

Wild solitary bees need three things close together: nectar and pollen from successive blooms, a dry undisturbed place to nest, and freedom from insecticide contact. This plot models a small restoration site where you control the proportion of native wildflower planting, exposed bare-ground nest banks (used by mining and mason bees that burrow into soil), and installed bee-hotel cavity nests (used by leafcutter and mason bees that nest in hollow stems and drilled blocks).

How it works

• Habitat score — a weighted 0–100 estimate combining forage coverage, nest-site availability and pesticide exposure, roughly matching the site-assessment scoring used by restoration practitioners.
• Wild bees active — an estimated population supported by the current mix of flowers and nest sites, capped by whichever resource is scarcest.
• Bees fly continuous loops between their home nest (a bare-ground burrow or a hotel cavity) and the nearest flower patch, each round trip counted as a foraging trip.
• Without flowers nearby, bees have nowhere to forage; without nest sites, there is nowhere for a population to establish even where flowers are abundant.

Controls

• Native flower coverage — share of the plot planted with native forage species.
• Bare-ground nest banks — share of the plot left as bare, compacted-free soil for ground-nesting bees.
• Bee-hotel density — number of cavity-nest structures installed around the plot.
• Season — shifts which native species are in bloom and their colour.
• Pesticide-free buffer — toggling this off simulates spray drift from neighbouring land, cutting the habitat score and bee survival.

Did you know?

Roughly 70% of the world's ~20,000 wild bee species nest in bare or sparsely vegetated ground rather than in hives — which is why "tidy" mulched or turfed margins can quietly remove most of the nesting habitat a site has to offer.