Find what works for bees, anywhere.
ActSmall · Bees is a free, map-first pollinator portal. Click any country to see managed beehive density, public bee-observation density, the share of land in agriculture, and one concrete action that fits the place. A small source-cited library lives alongside for anyone who wants to understand wild bees versus managed honeybees, the pesticide picture, or what “bee decline” actually measures. No accounts. No tracking. Nothing for sale.
Information only.
This site is not beekeeping advice, pest-control guidance, or medical advice for sting reactions. For an active hive, a suspected disease outbreak, or an allergic reaction, contact a qualified local beekeeper, an apiary inspector, or a medical professional. Read more about scope →
What the map shows
Managed beehives (FAOSTAT)
Country-level count of live bees (beehives, FAOSTAT element 5111) from the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s statistical division. This is the closest annual, globally-consistent measure of how much managed honeybee population a country reports.
Wild bee observations (GBIF)
Per-country public-occurrence density for the bee family Apidae, pulled from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. A low number for a country with high agricultural land is often a data gap as much as a biological one — and that gap is itself a citizen action.
Agricultural land share (World Bank)
Share of each country’s land in agricultural use (AG.LND.AGRI.ZS, FAO via World Bank). The single best country-level proxy for pesticide pressure and monoculture forage gaps that wild and managed bees face.
Honey production (FAOSTAT)
Annual natural honey production by country (FAOSTAT element 5510). Useful as a sanity check on managed-hive counts and as a rough indicator of how much working pollination infrastructure a country still operates.
Daily refresh
One small scheduled job pulls these public feeds once a day, normalises them, and serves the result to everyone who visits. Your browser only ever talks to our own server for the data layers. We never scrape; we only consume documented open-data APIs at their publication cadence.
One next step per country
Every click surfaces one concrete action tied to the local situation: plant a square metre of native forage, support a vetted pollinator NGO, learn the difference between wild bees and honeybees, or submit observations to GBIF/iNaturalist where the data is thin.
Why pollinators, why now
Roughly three quarters of the world’s leading food crops depend, to some degree, on animal pollination — the IPBES Assessment Report on Pollinators, Pollination and Food Production (2016) is the authoritative consensus document. The pollinator picture is uneven: managed honeybee populations are up globally over the long run (the total reported beehive count in FAOSTAT has been rising for decades), while many wild bee species are down in well-monitored regions — the European Red Lists, the IUCN bumblebee global assessments, COLOSS member-state colony-loss surveys across more than 30 countries, the UK Bumblebee Conservation Trust’s BeeWalk, and the US Bee Informed Partnership annual loss surveys all report the same direction of travel.
Those two signals are not in conflict; they are about different populations. The site exists to keep them straight, to point you at the data behind each one, and — once you understand which one you care about — to make the next concrete step as easy as we can.
From recognition to action, in one click
Click into any country and the map picks one concrete next step that fits it, based on the live data:
Plant native forage
If a country has high agricultural land share and thin GBIF coverage, the headline action is to add native forage somewhere you control — one square metre, one balcony planter, one school lawn corner. The map links to regional native-plant guides and trusted pollinator NGOs.
Submit one bee photo
If a country has a clear data gap, the headline action shifts to citizen science. A single Apidae photo submitted to GBIF or iNaturalist becomes a real public data point that researchers can cite — and many regions are still under-sampled enough that one observation moves the needle.
Donate to a vetted lab or NGO
If a country has high managed-hive density and the data shows the well-monitored colony-loss problem, the action surfaces vetted operators — COLOSS (international honeybee research network, 30+ countries), the Bumblebee Conservation Trust (UK), the Xerces Society (Americas-headquartered, global mission), and the Bee Informed Partnership (US) — with funding histories worth checking.
Read primary sources
For any country, the recommender also surfaces one entry from the library: a short primer on wild bees versus honeybees, on what colony-loss surveys actually measure, or on how pesticides are honestly ranked. No slogans — the data and the disputes.
Speak up where it’s contested
For countries with active pesticide-policy debates — the EU’s ongoing neonicotinoid restrictions, the UK’s emergency-authorisation reviews, Brazil’s ANVISA reassessments, Australia’s APVMA reconsiderations, India’s CIBRC reviews, the US EPA pollinator-protection registration reviews, and equivalents — the action carries a pre-written civil ask aimed at the relevant regulator or representative. You only have to pick the recipient and press send.
Open a data gap
If a country has no reliable public data behind it, the next-step action is opening that data: linking to GBIF, iNaturalist, and regional bee-monitoring schemes so the gap in front of you becomes the thing you can fill.
Below the headline action sit two small affordances: 30-day reminder downloads a calendar event so the commitment outlives the moment; Tell two people uses your share sheet so reach multiplies without friction. Nothing is tracked or sent anywhere.
And a small library, alongside
The map answers where and what next. The library answers why and how — for anyone who wants to understand the pollinator they’re reading about before they act on its behalf.
- Primers. The single most-confused thing in pollinator coverage is wild bees versus managed honeybees; everything else depends on it. Read that first.
- What “bee decline” actually measures. Annual colony-loss surveys (managed hives), Red List species assessments (wild bees), and range contraction over decades are three different signals that get mashed together in popular coverage.
- Project cards. Single-page printable guides — plant one square metre of native forage, submit one verified bee photo to public-data platforms. Things a 14-year-old can do this Saturday that produce a real data point.
Plain English, source-cited, published under CC BY-SA 4.0 — copy, translate, adapt, and republish freely; please keep source citations intact.
How the data stays current
A small scheduled job pulls public feeds once a day — FAOSTAT for live bees and honey production, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility for public Apidae occurrence density, and the World Bank Open Data API for agricultural-land share — normalises each one, and serves the result to every visitor. The same job revalidates every external link the recommender might surface, so dead links are caught the next morning rather than by you. Your browser only ever talks to our own server for the data layers. We never scrape; we only consume documented public APIs at their publication cadence.
Read more in methodology.
What this site is not
It is not a beekeeping primer. We do not teach you to keep bees; we point you at the regional associations that do. It is not a foundation, a fundraiser, or a campaign. There is no donation we are asking you to commit to, no membership, no subscription, no mailing list. There are no advertisements, no third-party trackers, and no captured visitor data.
It is not exhaustive. The pollinator world is enormous — native solitary bees, bumblebees, stingless bees, butterflies, hoverflies, and many other taxa — and our editorial bandwidth is small. Where the data behind a page is uncertain, we say so. Where we do not know, we do not write a primer.
It is not a substitute for working with qualified local beekeepers, apiary inspectors, entomologists, regulators, and the people who actually live near the hives and wildflowers in question.