Chart standing · US
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A single honeybee colony. One full year. A timeline you can drag through it, one day at a time. On the first of January the hive holds about nine thousand bees, drawn into a tight ball and living on last summer's honey. By the middle of June there are twenty nine thousand and every cell is spoken for. On the first of August the workers drag their own brothers to the entrance and refuse to let them back in. In the middle of September the queen raises a different sort of bee, one that will live for months instead of weeks, and those are the ones that will meet the spring. You are not keeping this hive. You are watching it, and you can stop on any day and ask why. WHAT YOU SEE A cut-away of the hive, filled in by the simulation itself. Every cell of honey, brood and beebread on screen is one the colony really has that day. Drag to any date and the comb, the population and the stores all agree, because they are all the same set of numbers. WHERE IT STANDS IS THE WHOLE QUESTION Choose the landscape, the cavity, and how exposed it sits. Then let go. Nothing you do after the first of January changes anything, because a colony cannot move, and everything it will eat this year is already growing within three miles of the hive. RUN THE YEAR TWICE Change one thing and watch the same year come out differently: two curves on one chart, with the difference put into words. One variable at a time, which is the only way an answer means anything. THREE PLACES TO STAND A mixed hedgerow with a stream below. Four hundred hectares of a single crop. Three hundred suburban gardens. Early summer is the stretch when the spring blossom is finished and the summer flowers have not opened. Beside the hedgerow something is always coming into bloom, so the colony never feels it. On the monoculture the same weeks are an empty run two months long, and the colony reaches it larger and hungrier than at any other point in its year. Nobody wrote that in. It is what happens when you add up what is actually in flower. EIGHT LESSONS Short, plain, and tied to the year running behind them. What a jar of honey costs. Why a steady trickle beats one enormous crop. What a mown lawn looks like from a bee's point of view. FREE AND PAID The hedgerow year and the first lesson are free and complete, with nothing held back inside them. One purchase, once, opens the other two landscapes and the seven remaining lessons. No subscription, no account, no ads, and nothing collected about you. It works with the network off, and it is shareable with your family.
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