ActSmall · Bees

About ActSmall · Bees

A small, slowly-growing pollinator portal: a country map driven by open data, a short library of source-cited primers, and one concrete next step per country. The shared policies (privacy, license, terms, contribute) live on actsmall.org — this page covers only what is specific to bees.

What this topic is

There is a great deal of pollinator content already in the world. A lot of it is excellent: IPBES’s 2016 global assessment, the IUCN regional Red Lists, the US Bee Informed Partnership annual loss surveys, the UK Bumblebee Conservation Trust, the Xerces Society in North America, and many national bee-monitoring schemes. The problem most readers actually have is not a lack of material; it is access. The technical material is hard to find without already knowing where to look. The popular material is often too thin, too partisan, or buried under engagement traps.

This site exists to be a small, durable, signup-free middle layer for pollinators: a country map driven by open data, a short library of source-cited primers, and a recommender that suggests one concrete next step per place. The unit of value is the seed — a self-contained primer or project card someone can read in fifteen minutes and walk away from already understanding more than they did, with named sources to dig into next.

Editorial care specific to bees

  • Wild bees and honeybees are different stories. Managed honeybee populations are globally up over the long run; many wild bee species are down in well-monitored regions. The site keeps the two signals separate. Conflating them is the single most common error in popular pollinator coverage.
  • Sampling effort, not abundance. Low GBIF country counts often reflect uneven sampling effort, not biological rarity. We say so on every country card.
  • Pesticide guidance is general. We do not give specific pesticide-application advice; we point to the relevant national extension service and the IPBES & EFSA risk-assessment literature.

The shared editorial posture — source-cited, plain English, no engagement loops, no donations — lives at actsmall.org/about/.

Data sources for bees

The country map joins three open-data feeds, pulled once a day at ~06:47 UTC (with up to a 60-minute jitter window) by a small AWS Lambda. The Lambda only consumes documented public APIs at their published cadence; it never scrapes, never crawls, and never bypasses a rate limit.

  • Managed beehives and honey production. FAOSTAT via its public bulk-download endpoint. We pull live-bee counts (element 5111, beehives) and natural-honey production (element 5510), latest reported year per country. FAOSTAT data is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO; we link out and do not redistribute it as a primary product. Caveat: FAOSTAT is largely self-reported by national statistical offices and varies in quality.
  • Public bee-occurrence density. Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) occurrence-search API for the bee family Apidae (familyKey 4334), grouped by publishing country. GBIF aggregates many national datasets and is the most-cited public source for species-occurrence data. Caveat: low country counts often reflect uneven sampling effort, not biological rarity — we say so on every country card.
  • Agricultural land share. World Bank Open Data, AG.LND.AGRI.ZS (agricultural land as % of land area; FAO data series, served via World Bank, CC BY 4.0). Used as a coarse proxy for pesticide and monoculture pressure on pollinators.

How the daily refresh and curator work in general: actsmall.org/methodology/.

If something is wrong

If you find an error, an out-of-date source, a broken link, or a claim that overstates the underlying evidence: please email submissions@actsmall.org with the page URL and what looks wrong. The maintainers will review.

Where to read more