Bee Grateful Initiative

Currently, the world sees bees as a pest at best, or an enemy at worst. The loss of love for nature’s most important creatures is felt and will negatively impact our future. The last bastion for them are those who work and care for them, the beekeeping community. This community interacts with bees on a regular basis and understand that they are essential to survival of most living organisms. However, the beekeeping community is fragmented and their influence spread thin due to poor communication channels between beekeepers and bee enthusiasts.

In order to combat the negative stigma against bees and enhance the sense of community among bee enthusiasts, we have decided to build a mobile app. This mobile app will house various features that will increase interaction within the beekeeping community as well as increase awareness for those who are misguided. This is to be achieved by hosting multiple sources of bee related information as well as guides to bee handling and beekeeping. To promote the community aspect, there is the updates, map and messaging components. These three components work in tandem to bolster communication and interaction between users.

For the tech stack, we went with React + Vite for the front-end, node.js for the backend, firebase for our data storage and capacitor to port the app to mobile. This suite works well for our main feature of the app, the map. The map component uses the react library, Leaflet, in order to easily render the map with sufficient functionality.

This app has the potential to succeed with its goal of spreading awareness and promoting community. There is still lots of room to grow within the app as well as within our environment. We need to care and nurture that which surrounds us.