Know when your flow is coming
Nectarcast works out when each nectar flow at your apiary is likely to start, so supers go on in time and you are not guessing from last year's diary. Built for Australian beekeepers, starting in Tasmania.
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Free. Nectarcast costs nothing while it is in development, and anyone who signs up now keeps it free for life. Sign-in is an emailed link — no password, no card.
Nobody near here has shared a calibrated flow yet, so this is the weather picture only — how this season compares with the 16 before it. That needs no observations from anyone, and names no place finer than the cell above.
That area is a guess from your connection, which is often out by a long way. Search for your town to correct it.
A city is a starting point, not your area: a cell is about 25 km across, so if you are an hour out of town, search for your own town instead.
The calendar is the wrong clock
Plants do not run on dates. They run on accumulated warmth, and warmth does not arrive on schedule — at the apiary in the chart, the same amount of it turned up a month apart in the warmest and coolest of sixteen seasons. A diary of past dates cannot tell you which kind of year you are having.
Growing degree days are that warmth, counted. Each day above about 10 °C adds to a running total for the season; a cold week adds almost nothing, a hot one adds a lot. A given flow starts at roughly the same total every year, even when the date moves by a month. Find that number once and it keeps working.
What you get
Every forecast is a range, and it narrows as the season goes on and the weather stops being a guess. A single confident date would be a lie.
Thresholds are fitted from what you logged at that apiary, with its own altitude and sixteen years of its own weather. A ridge and a valley are not the same site.
A new site borrows thresholds beekeepers nearby have calibrated, so it forecasts something before you have logged a season of your own.
Each flow you log sharpens the numbers. Nothing is fitted from anyone else's observations — your forecast is built from yours.
How it works
- Add your apiary. A name and a position. Its altitude is looked up, and sixteen seasons of weather fetched for that ground at that height.
- Log what you see. “Blackberry started today.” Backdating is expected — flows get noticed in gloves and written up that evening.
- Watch the window. Each sighting pins the threshold down further, and next season's forecast tightens around it.
Your sites are private
Their names, coordinates and observations are visible only to you and to people you invite, and are never shared with anyone else. New sites do join the shared pool, which contributes the fitted thresholds and an area about 25 km across — anonymously, never a name, an exact position or a raw observation. That is what lets a new site forecast anything at all. You can turn it off per site, at any time. Privacy policy.
What does it cost?
Nothing. Nectarcast is free while it is in development, and everyone who signs up during that time keeps it free for life — whatever happens to pricing later. There is no trial, no card and no plan to choose.
Where does it work?
Nectarcast is built for Australia. The flows beekeepers share, and the checks of its weather against Bureau of Meteorology stations, are Australian — most of them Tasmanian so far, because that is where it started. The weather comparison on this page works anywhere in the world, but outside Australia there is nobody nearby to borrow flows from yet.
Where does the weather come from?
In Australia, daily temperatures and rain come from SILO, the Queensland Government's interpolation of Bureau of Meteorology station records onto a 5 km grid that follows the terrain. Checked against 30 Bureau thermometers from the coast to the highlands, it was the closest of the sources tried. The next fortnight comes from Open-Meteo's forecast, and so does everything outside Australia.
Who built this?
Luke Briggs, a beekeeper in Tasmania, built Nectarcast to stop guessing when flows would start from a diary of dates that never repeated. The apiary in the chart is one of Luke's. More about the project, or write to dev@nectarcast.com.
Sign in and add your first apiary
Wanting a hive scale in this, an onsite weather station, or something else entirely? Say so — it is early enough that what gets built next is decided by what beekeepers ask for.