The Bee-Finder has been open to everyone since September 2022: private individuals, architects, developers and public institutions. A few clicks show the wild bee species occurring within 500, 1000 or 2000 metres of a given address. Every query produces a downloadable list of the priority target species at that location, with details of their nesting and pollen preferences.
It draws exclusively on scientifically collected data: the register of the 567 Swiss wild bee species not yet extinct, almost 100,000 precisely located records, 273 flowering plants and 57,864 interactions between plants and bees. The records come from systematic surveys by specialist ecologists and from the surveys for the new Red List of threatened wild bees in Switzerland.
The Bee-Finder keeps learning. Under the working title Bee-Finder 2.0, the plant catalogue is to grow from just over 200 to all roughly 4,000 insect-pollinated plants native to Switzerland. The biogeographical region and the altitude of the queried address will be added, so that only plants suited to that location are recommended. And the app is to learn French and Italian.
More on the project pages Bee-Finder and Bee-Finder 2.0.