# North American Honey Bee Forage Map



## Jerry T Indiana

Thank you. That is really cool.


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## jfmcree

Great info. Thank you for sharing.

Jim.


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## tech.35058

Thanks for the links.
So attempting to use this data, ( for North Alabama )
http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/Honeybees/ForageRegion.php?StReg=AL_11
month "0" is January, and month "11" is December ?
Plants ending bloom in December, ( therefore blooming through November) are:
Golden Rod
Aster
Smartweed

Smart weed & aster I am not familiar with , Golden rod blooming through November ..... perhaps not so much.
Good Luck with your bees. CE


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## squarepeg

excellent link, have not seen it before, many thanks.


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## dynemd

tech.35058 said:


> Thanks for the links.
> So attempting to use this data, ( for North Alabama )
> http://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/Honeybees/ForageRegion.php?StReg=AL_11
> month "0" is January, and month "11" is December ?


Except for in California Eucalyptus blooms in month 12


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## Michael Palmer

Well, they didn't get it right for my area. Most of my main honey plants are listed as not significant.

White dutch clover, Vetch, Sweet clover, and Basswood not significant? Sounds like someone with an office job is drawing maps again.


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## heaflaw

They did not do well for NC either. I am in western Piedmont NC and the map includes us with Mountains. Here we do not have Basswood or Black Locust and Sourwood is very inconsistent. NC State has much better info.


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## Rxmaker

Nice data, but 23+ years old


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## UTvolshype

"Table produced by George S. Ayers and Jay R. Harman, both of Michigan State University, and provided in Chapter 11 (Bee Forage of North America and the Potential for Planting for Bees) of the book The Hive and the Honey Bee, 1992, Graham, J. ed. Dadant and Sons Inc. Hamilton, Illinois."

So source is not some GIS map jockey at NASA, but don't get me started about NASA and data fibbing.


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## Sunday Farmer

Coast of jersey and south Florida in the same zone? Have fun with that.


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## Michael Palmer

UTvolshype said:


> "Table produced by George S. Ayers and Jay R. Harman, both of Michigan State University, and provided in Chapter 11 (Bee Forage of North America and the Potential for Planting for Bees) of the book The Hive and the Honey Bee, 1992, Graham, J. ed. Dadant and Sons Inc. Hamilton, Illinois."


I have great respect for George Ayers. I always read his honey plant column. Doesn't change the fact that he got it wrong. I wonder what he read that convinced him that the plants I listed aren't significant honey plants.


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## drlonzo

Michael Palmer said:


> Doesn't change the fact that he got it wrong.


Same for my area here in WV. They have Sumac listed as Significant, and Wingstem and Knotweed as Not. When in fact it is exactly the opposite. My bees ignore the Sumac most years and feast on the Knotweed and Wingstem.


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## GaryG74

It's a good starting point, especially for beginners. Agree with posters about some things being incorrect for their area (like privet being insignificant in AL, don't agree with that), but it gives some idea of approximate bloom dates.


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## Phoebee

drlonzo said:


> Same for my area here in WV. They have Sumac listed as Significant, and Wingstem and Knotweed as Not. When in fact it is exactly the opposite. My bees ignore the Sumac most years and feast on the Knotweed and Wingstem.


I did run into that map in 2014. I dug into it and found it did not line up particularly well with our experience.

Like drlonzo, we have an abundance of Wingstem (aka Golden Honey Plant), whereas we have only a trace of Goldenrod. Unlike drlonzo, our bees visit Wingstem occasionally, but have never gotten a significant flow from it. We're overwhelmed with Crown Vetch, and can't get clovers to bloom worth a darn. Digging into it, I'm convinced it is a local soil pH and nutrient issue. So consequently this NASA map, which covers huge swaths of land, does not tell us much about our little patch. Soil chemistry maps or small scale geological maps might. NASA satellites can reveal highly localized data on local plant species and their health, and that would be much more meaningful than the whole US forage map above.


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## squarepeg

GaryG74 said:


> It's a good starting point, especially for beginners. Agree with posters about some things being incorrect for their area (like privet being insignificant in AL, don't agree with that), but it gives some idea of approximate bloom dates.


that's how i saw it too gary. the best practice is to keep notes of bloom dates for your area from year to year and compare that with hive observations.


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## RichardsonTX

This is a book that I refer to sometimes.................. https://archive.org/stream/cu31924062872985/cu31924062872985_djvu.txt

It's dated but a good resource for the Texas and surrounding region.


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## JWChesnut

The NASA map is a prime example of the "dumbing down" of knowledge. Fancy graphics and flat-out wrong information.

"The Girl Next Door" would be far better served to read *G. H. Vansell -- The Nectar and Pollen Plants of California* -- published in 1931 as Bulletin 517 by the Agriculture Experiment Station - UC Berkeley.

The Vansell volume, can be downloaded in many formats from the Internet Archive. It is required reading for beekeepers in California. I have a treasured and worn volume, patched with tape, and discarded by some modern library converting to the ephemeral digital fantasies of the modern age.

https://archive.org/download/nectarpollenplan517vans/nectarpollenplan517vans.pdf


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## RichardsonTX

JWChesnut..........thanks for the book info. 

Other beekeepers, who may be aware of publications providing information that affects bee foraging in their regions, please share that info with the rest of us. In addition to plant info, I'm interested in updated information about changes made to crop treatments that could be more favorable or less favorable to bees foraging those crops. I'm interested in all this information. 

Since I've been keeping bees I've discovered that beekeepers are botanists and entomologists to a certain extent. When I talk to old beekeepers, farmers, and ranchers here in Texas I am amazed at the information they have from years of being outside observing their environment. The information they provide may not use the same terminology and format as scientists/researchers use but it’s there. Those educated researchers would do well sometimes to get off their high horse and glean this information from those sources who care about their environment and have depended on understanding/observing it to make a living. I wonder how many people these days know what poke salad is, or mayhaws, gathered wild blackberries/wild plums to make jelly or a cobbler pie, ate a persimmon that wasn't quite ripe, planted and ate mustard greens, fig preserves, scalded and butchered little Wilbur, sat by an old white oak tree waiting for "them squirrel to come out" so you could "pop them" with that ole .22 and in the meantime watched and learned about all the plant/animal life around you, heated the house solely with wood you cut/split/gathered when you were out feeding the cows and cooled it by opening the windows (even though there was central heat and air, too expensive), shelled peas, shared a party line (know what that is?), knows what chitlins are, and had a parent that stills gripes about the local electric coop not doing exactly what they "said" when they "hooked" them up with electricity. I am only 45 and grew up that way but my wife who is 39 and who grew up a city girl has thought I was crazy sometimes as she got to know me, especially the first time she saw me butcher two deer on our kitchen table. Now I deal with stinging insects. I'm a "city boy" these days but even in the country things are changing. People are eating meat and vegetables that came from the grocery store (full of chemicals), air conditioning their houses, driving around in air conditioned cars/tractors, some even sit in an air conditioned deer stand these days, ride 4-wheelers around instead of stretching a leg or saddling up the horse, paying someone to mow/maintain their yard, has a TV now (what are books for?. 

Specialization (labor, monocrops, education, etcetera) has made our society more efficient but in ways it's isolated individuals into a smaller environment that puts them way behind those "grumpy old men and women" who knew that if they didn't get up each morning, put their boots on, and get to it then in a short period they were going to get very hungry. The "professionals" of our society, and all of us, have a lot to learn from these folks before they become a thing of history. They want to pass on that information but people are too busy to listen sometimes, maybe they don't know how to operate the "internet", but we've got to understand the potential of information that is there and glean it, if for nothing else so it's passed on to our children for their benefit.

“The only source of knowledge is experience.”….Albert Einstein


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## Phoebee

The motto from my web page:

_A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, pitch manure, solve equations, analyze a new problem, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects._

(Except, of course, for bees, who are good at many things.)

Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough For Love
Excerpt from the notebooks of Lazarus Long


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## Girl Next Door Honey

Thanks for the book recommendation. Too bad the map wasn't accurate for everyone. Another good book for California that has really great native bee photos and information is California Bees and Blooms. It has a whole section on planting for native bees, but I find most plants native bees like, honey bees will like, too.


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## bugmeister

There is a saying someone said...maybe a politician... that ' all politics is local''...maybe it should be said ' all nectar sources are local".its kind of what works for your bees..no? B


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