5 July 2026
BeeGuide got an honorable mention
BeeGuide got an honorable mention in the 2026 3M Young Scientist Challenge. There were four in the whole country this year. Mine is one of them. Here's the list.
The full name of my project is a mouthful:
BeeGuide: A Soil Probe and Pollinator Food Security Index to Eliminate Bloom Gaps in Native Pollinator Habitats
That's the board in the picture. I built it in my backyard. That's where I tested everything too.
What the challenge is
It's run by 3M and Discovery Education. It's for kids in grades 5 to 8 in the US.
You don't send in a finished project. You send a video, one or two minutes long. In it you explain an invention you came up with that fixes an everyday problem. This year, entries closed on April 30.
They pick 10 finalists. Those ten each get a real 3M scientist as a mentor for the summer, who helps them build their idea for real. At the end, one of them wins $25,000 and the title America's Top Young Scientist. They also pick a state winner for each state, and four honorable mentions.
I didn't make the top 10. I'm a little bummed, because the mentor part is the bit I really wanted. But being one of four in the country is pretty good. I'll take it.
What I sent in
My problem is bloom gaps.
A bloom gap is when nothing in a garden is flowering for a few weeks. If you're a person, you don't even notice. If you're a bee, that's the week you don't eat.
Lots of pollinator gardens look amazing in June. Then August comes and there's nothing. The bees that live there all year are stuck.
So BeeGuide does two things. First you use a soil probe on your dirt. It tells the app how wet your soil is, how acidic, and how much sun you get. Then the app looks up three things: which bees have really been seen near your ZIP code, which flowers those exact bees have been recorded visiting, and when each plant blooms where you live.
Then it picks plants that cover the whole season instead of all blooming at once. It also tells you how many to get, and what month to plant each one.
The part I like best isn't the app. It's that it uses real records of real bees near you. Most "plants for pollinators" lists are the same for the whole country. Bees don't live in a whole country. They live on your street.
What's next
An honorable mention isn't the end. Right now BeeGuide mostly lives on my laptop. That's the next job: getting the site and the app out where anyone can use them, not just me.
After that I want to ask nurseries near me if they'll team up. The app can tell you exactly what to plant, but it's not much help if you can't find the plants anywhere. I'd like it to point you at a real shop down the road.
I'd rather someone actually planted one of these beds than win anything.