Home Sweet Home
Ashley Wang, Kimberly Yu, Margaret Yu
The data say that honey consumption in the U.S. is increasing, but the yield per bee colony is declining in the U.S. We want to tell this story because bees are very important for the pollination of approximately one third of the United States’ crop species, including a variety of fruits and nuts. Given the inversely proportional relationship between honey consumption and yield per bee colony and the phenomenon of colony collapse disorder, beekeepers should be well-informed of the situation of bee colonies in their state. Our audience is potential hobbyist beekeepers. Our goals are to provide beekeepers with information about trends in yield per colony in their state as well as resources for becoming a beekeeper.
We looked at USDA datasets from the years 2000 – 2016 as well as the winter loss rate from the years 2007 – 2016 and yearly honey consumption data from the USDA. From the winter loss rate data, we see that the number of bee colonies is decreasing at higher rates.
We used Tableau to create a time series of the yield per bee colony in the United States between the years 2000 – 2016. The hex tiles represent the honeycomb constructed by bees, and each hex tile corresponds to a U.S. state. The golden-yellow hues represent the amount of honey and the yield per bee colony. The darker the hue, the higher the yield.
Presenting the data as a time series using hex-tile maps provides the audience, potential hobbyist beekeepers, with relevant information on how productive/healthy bee colonies are in different states.
Clicking on a state will reveal more detailed statistics on metrics such as production, stocks, and average price per pound as well as resources such as links to websites for beekeepers in a specific state and general beekeeping resources. We included this user interaction because we feel that potential hobbyist beekeepers could benefit greatly from learning about the details of beekeeping within a specific state.
National Honey Bee Day (the third Saturday of August) would be a promotional day where Amazon would display the slides on their website and have a sale on bee starter kits, and grocery stores can set up a special booth selling honey and bee starter kits as well as displaying screens with the slides.
