10 April 2026

Why I built BeeGuide

Every "plant these for pollinators" list I found was written for a whole country, or for somebody else's climate. The bees in my neighbourhood are not the bees in a magazine, and the plants they visit are not the plants in a national top ten.

So BeeGuide starts from the other end. You give it a ZIP code, a soil reading and the size of your bed, and it looks up:

• which bee species have actually been recorded near you, from iNaturalist
• which flowers those bees have been seen visiting, from research records
• what each plant needs to grow where you are, from USDA data
• when your first and last frost usually fall, from ten years of weather

Then it designs the bed: how many of each plant, where each one goes, and which month to put it in the ground.

What is next

More regions in the catalogue, photos of the beds as they fill in, and — I hope — a local nursery willing to fill the orders the app produces.

If you plant one, tell me what showed up. That is the part I want to write about.