Hello Tura; If you have, or can get, historical data from local beekeepers you can estimate from that. If there are no local beekeepers, that might suggest that honey production is not a viable enterprise. Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers

Tura -

If you want to know "...the total no. of productive plants with massive flowers per a given area ..." then that sounds like a possible application of area cluster sampling.  But then you need "...average honey yield per plant/season" and that sounds to me like the result of lab experiments. ???  This is not a subject matter area for me, so I do not know how that is normally done. 

What Jim Des Lauriers said sounds to me like a possible endorsement of a time series, perhaps exponential smoothing with the seasonal part included, if you can obtain suitable data. 

A model-based approach would mean that if you have the most recent past complete data, and a sample of the current areas which correspond to some of those areas, you might 'prediction' (estimate) for the other areas using a ratio model. 

I hope the above may help give you some ideas, but it might help if you described more fully how this is usually done and what problems you have encountered. 

Cheers - Jim

Hi Tura

I am doing such evaluations since 2003, all depends on your objectives, if you want some precision you can use the following workflow :

Globally the method is the one described by James, you need

1) a phytosociological analyse of your territory (This is field observation, and can be rather rapid in homogeneous regions) to give you the % of the surface (I am using % in volume in forest, better) covered by the different melliferous plants.

2) a database of the nectar production of each plants, Eastern Europe researchers produced such lists some decades ago, but if you have no data, you can evaluate the nectar production by measuring it with capillaries (easy on some plants, challenging on others).

=> The result you get is a global honey production, of little practical interest (just giving you a theorical value).

To get more interesting values, you need phenological data for each plant so you can produce a yearly profile of honey/pollen production, and compare it to mean climatic conditions (rather easy, now as open climatic database can be available).

If you place these data in a GIS system, you can get interesting infomations on the possibilities to improve the melliferous value of the place, including evaluating the cost of these operations and stakeholders involved.

If the idea is to evaluate the beekeeping potential, you need to make first an inquiry among local beekeepers, to record their annual workflow, production by honeyflow, and main practices and risks. With these data, you can build a bee farm model that you can compare to the potential. With GIS system you can modelise apiaries (nb of colonies covering a foraging area) in the territory you cartographied.

The whole process seems very complicated, but your objectives may not cover the entire procedure, I am generally asked to do a part of the global tasks. It have to be considered as an initial investment. When it is done, the marginal adaptations are cheap, even more in a forest (small variations in the vegetations from one year to another). The best way is to work on a full season, in order to have a complete view of the vegetation (some plants are difficult to see at some periods of the year.

Hope this helps, it is necessary summarized

Michel

Ha! Ask a Beekeeper! That amount is going to change with the season, the amount of rainfall, the weather, and human activity...

As well as the type of bee- is it a European or Africanized variety? Because the Africanized produce approximately four times as much honey per hive in the exact same area worked by European bees. But boy, are they awful to work around!

Are you talking about Langstroth hives, Top Bar hives, Native cavity hives, Long hives?

Sorry- there are simply too many variables in your question. If there are lots of Beekers in the area, an average could possibly be obtained; but there also, you have backyard Beekers, commercial honey producers, and traveling hives for pollination.

See? Too many variables.

I hope you can follow up on this project, and I don't mean to discourage you. Keep asking the questions; talk to the Beekers.

Good luck

This could help

https://www.sciencedirect.com/sdfe/reader/pii/S1319562X14001272/pdf