[OC] Die Geographie und Saisonalität einheimischer Bienen und Wespen, die in Bienenhotels leben

Most people are surprised to learn that there are bees that live solitary lives, and that there are far more of them than social bees like honey bees. They are sometimes even more surprised to learn that there are even more solitary wasps.

I make bee hotels that house the types they call “cavity nesters” – those that live in small holes in wood. I wanted to make a visualization that helped people understand which ones they could expect to see near them, and what time of year they are out.

All data is pulled from iNaturalist, a community-led initiative for cataloguing plant and animal species. I extracted data from their API (https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+reference) using a simple notebook written in Python and aggregated it into the 16 genera that exist in North America. I use PostGIS exposed through a FastAPI endpoint to do a geospatial lookup based on the user’s specified location (submitted via Google’s [Place Class Maps API](https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/place)), and then visualize it with a bit of JavaScript and Apache ECharts.