Is It Bigger Than A Bee? started with a deliberately silly idea.
You type in an object and the website tells you whether it is bigger than a bee, explains why, and estimates how many bees would equal its mass.
But the comparison is really the doorway into the important part.
Every visit also introduces you to a real bee species with a photograph, common name, and scientific name. You can search species or click Learn More to see where that bee lives, what it eats, how it nests, what it pollinates, whether it has been introduced somewhere outside its native range, and what we know about its conservation status.
If a bee is threatened, the site makes that difficult to overlook. Threatened species can display an I NEED HELP! warning with information about population trends, threats, and conservation. Extinct and possibly extinct bees are highlighted too, while preserving the difference between evidence and uncertainty.
The site also pays special attention to invasive species by separating native range from introduced range. A species is not simply branded “bad.” The goal is to explain where it belongs naturally, where it has been introduced, and what ecological effects can occur when it becomes invasive there.
Behind the website is a growing database we call the Beetabase.
It is built with Node.js and PostgreSQL and runs in Docker. PostgreSQL is the site’s organized long-term memory: it stores structured records for bees, taxonomy, photographs, sources, conservation data, facts, cached comparisons, and other information.
The Beetabase can gather information from biodiversity resources, search for scientifically identified reusable photographs, cache those images locally, preserve their sources and licensing information, and put new species through human review before publication.
Artificial intelligence is used where fuzzy reasoning is actually useful. A completely new physical comparison can be estimated by an OpenAI model, but once an answer has been generated it is stored in PostgreSQL. If someone asks the same question later, the website can serve the cached answer instead of paying an AI model to think about the same bowling ball again.
So the technology is fairly sophisticated, but the mission is simple:
There are thousands upon thousands of bee species, and most people will knowingly encounter only a tiny fraction of that diversity. Some are social, many are solitary. Some nest underground, some in wood, some in hollow stems. Some are familiar and fuzzy; others are metallic green, blue, tiny, strange, or almost completely unknown outside entomology.
The joke gets you through the door.
The photograph gives the animal an identity.
The Beetabase gives it a story.
Conservation is why we hope you stay.