Bee Me Up!

Dating humans is cool and all, but have you ever wanted to date a bee? No? Well, uh, do it anyway! Find bees in your area and the plants they like, and learn how you can help the dying bee population.

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Inspiration

Last summer, as I was starting to pick out plants to garden, I was looking for resources about pollinators in my region and the plants that I could add for them. My results were frustratingly sparse, especially since I knew that the bees were amidst a pandemic of their own. I was reminded of this frustration with the theme of Greenhouse. I became inspired to make a pool of resources dedicated for just this—a place where you can meet the bees of your area, get to know what kind of locally native plants they like, and learn about how you can help the declining bee population. Learn more

What it does

When given a state, Bee Me Up shows you a species of bee that resides in your state and suggests some local and non-local plants that it would like.

How we built it

I used Flask in Replit to design the back-end and pure CSS (alternate spelling: torture) for the front-end. The real bee images are from Wikipedia's open API.

Challenges we ran into

Data on bee habitation and native plants are either scarce or hard to manage. I had to scrape many different sources to compile lists of bee sightings and locations, native milkweeds, and other plants.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm kind of proud of it all! Twenty-four hours ago, I had no idea how to use Flask, Replit, or Heroku. It's not very aesthetically pleasing (we can call that a uhh stylistic choice), but I'm walking away pleased with what I've learned!

What we learned

Technical skills: Flask, Heroku, the maximum force for which banging my head against my desk will not incur brain damage (or should I say looking for bugs?) General skills: time management, persistence, learning mindset

What's next for Bee Me Up!

Other than an obvious graphical upgrade (or stylistic change ;] ), my next steps will be to add pictures and details to the flowers and plants so that a user can see what they would look like in their garden, as well as making the website more accessible and WAVE compliant.

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