🗺️ Colony Foraging Range Calculator
How much ground can a colony work? Pick a species or set your own radius to see the foraging area in square kilometres and hectares, and optionally check whether colonies at a given density would compete for forage.
🗺️ Foraging area
The economics of range
A colony's foraging radius sets the scale of everything it does: how much food it can gather, how many neighbours it competes with, and how far its influence spreads as a pollinator or a predator. Because area grows with the square of the radius, a honeybee ranging 6 km commands a territory hundreds of times larger than a leafcutter ant working a quarter-kilometre of trails.
When colonies pack in tightly, those ranges overlap and foragers from different nests draw on the same flowers, driving the competition that shapes colony spacing, territory defence, and how many colonies a landscape can support.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How is the foraging area calculated?
The tool treats a colony's foraging territory as a circle of the given radius around the nest, so the area is π × radius². One square kilometre equals 100 hectares, so both units are shown. It is a geometric idealisation — real foraging is patchy and biased toward the richest patches.
Where do the species radii come from?
They are typical maximum foraging ranges reported in the literature: honeybees can range out to about 6 km, bumblebees around 1.5 km, common wasps roughly 0.4 km, and leafcutter ants about 0.25 km along their trails. You can override the radius with your own figure for any species or situation.
What does the overlap check do?
If you enter a colony density in colonies per square kilometre, each colony has on average 1 ÷ density km² to itself. When the foraging disc is bigger than that, neighbouring colonies' ranges overlap and they compete for the same forage, so the effective exclusive area is capped at the per-colony share.
Do colonies really forage a full circle?
Not exactly — bees and ants concentrate on the best patches and forage far less area than the maximum radius suggests, and terrain, wind, and forage distribution all skew the shape. The circle gives an upper bound useful for comparing species and thinking about competition, not a literal map.