Toronto’s bees

By Leslie Young

Last week, we put together a map of beeyard locations in Toronto. They’re all over downtown and the west end, which is pretty neat – people seem to be really taking up this hobby.

You can read the story here and download the data from Buzzdata (ha!) here.

We got the idea to show not just the beeyard locations, but also the foraging areas of those bees, so that people would know where they are likely to encounter bees from a given hive. It seemed simple enough: find out the range of a bee (about 3km) and draw circles with that radius around each point.

Finding an effective way to do this was surprisingly difficult. We hit upon this great tool from freemaptools.com, which allowed you to set a radius and bulk upload a set of points. It then draws a circle around each point and lets you export the resulting polygon.

It’s very easy to use and something we’ll be keeping in our toolbox for future projects.