Twelve stacked bars are arranged in a circle like a clock face, one per month, around a small model apiary. Each bar's height is the estimated hours a UK hobbyist beekeeper spends that month, split into inspections, feeding, varroa/health checks, honey extraction and the "hidden" admin and equipment time that beginners often forget to budget for.
The wheel is busiest from April to August — active-season inspections and swarm control dominate — then tails off sharply through autumn feeding and varroa treatment, leaving winter as mostly quiet admin and equipment checks.
Most new UK beekeepers underestimate total annual hours by focusing only on the 20-minute hive inspection and forgetting travel time, record-keeping, equipment cleaning and the multi-hour extraction day — the numbers here fold all of that back in.
Twelve monthly bars arranged in a circle around a model apiary turn hive inspections, feeding, varroa treatment, honey extraction and admin/equipment time into a single annual time-budget wheel.
Beekeeping time is heavily seasonal: April–August inspections and swarm control dominate, autumn brings feeding and varroa treatment, and winter is mostly quiet admin — a pattern beginners rarely expect from a "weekly hobby."
Set the number of hives, pick an experience level, adjust the inspection interval, and toggle honey extraction on or off. Watch the monthly bars and the annual, peak-week and winter-month stats update instantly.
A single hive inspection may only take 20–30 minutes, but travel, suiting up, record-keeping and equipment cleaning routinely double or triple the real time cost — which is exactly what the "admin" segment captures here.