Type what you're actually trying to do - "a coffee shop somewhere busy in Houston" - and Scout Bee sets up the map, shows you exactly what it changed, keeps your own changes, and lets you undo it. Here is everything it can do, using Houston throughout.
Most location tools ask you to know the vocabulary before they will help you: pick a dataset, pick a measure, pick a classification method. Scout Bee, the AI map assistant built into MapBees, works the other way round. You type what you are actually trying to do - “I want to open a coffee shop somewhere busy in Houston” - and it builds the map for you, then shows you exactly what it changed so you can argue with it.
This guide walks through everything Scout Bee can do, using Houston for every example. There is no jargon you need in advance; each term is explained the first time it shows up, and there is a glossary at the end. If you have never opened a mapping tool in your life, you are the reader this was written for.
The examples cover the Score, Cross two, catchments and market share. Scout Bee draws other map types too when a question calls for one - “more cafés than its fair share” gets a Fair share map, “room for more pharmacies” a Missing map, “are this many bars here more than chance?” a Clusters map, and “a diverse food scene” a Variety map.
One sentence in the Scout Bee panel on the right; a scored map of the whole of Houston on the left. Nothing else was clicked.
First, what the map actually is
MapBees does not think in streets or postcodes. It chops a city into thousands of small, equal-sized hexes - a hex is one hexagon on the map, about 350 m across (roughly 0.1 km²), the size of a few city blocks. Houston is 49,533 of them. For every single hex it already knows things like how many people live there, how many coffee shops or offices or schools sit inside it, how much building space there is, and how well served it is by transit.
That is the whole trick. Because every hex carries the same set of numbers, any question of the form “where is there a lot of this and not much of that?” becomes something a computer can answer for the entire city at once. Scout Bee's job is to turn your sentence into that question.
In plain English: Hex
One hexagon on the map, about 350 m across (roughly 0.1 km²). Everything - people, shops, buildings - is kept hex by hex, which is what lets you add up any shape you like later.
Houston before you ask anything: 49,533 hexes, each already carrying its own numbers.
How a conversation works
Scout Bee lives behind the Scout Bee button at the bottom-right of the map. Open it and you get a text box with a few suggested questions. You are not picking from a menu - anything you can describe is fair game.
The starting point. Type a sentence, or tap one of the suggested questions.
Every answer is laid out the same way, so you always know where to look. It opens with the answer in one line. Under it, How I read your question lists each part of what you typed and what Scout Bee took it to mean - and says so plainly when it had to use something narrower, or leave a part out. Then comes the map the answer goes with.
Three buttons sit with that map, and they are the reason you can trust it:
Show on map - puts the answer on the map. (With Auto-apply on in the header, it is already there; switch it off if you would rather approve each one yourself.)
Undo - puts the map back exactly as it was. Nothing Scout Bee does is one-way.
Copy link - a link that reopens this exact map for anyone you send it to.
Below the map, a folded section called How this was worked out holds the detail for anyone who wants it, with Show the math folded inside that. And under some answers you will find rows of one-tap chips: Or see it offers the same question drawn as another kind of map, and Or measure it offers it measured another way. When Scout Bee can't answer something, it says why in one line and lists What I can show instead.
The important bit
Scout Bee never hides what it did behind a black box. Whatever it sets up appears in the same panels and sliders you would have used yourself - and you can drag any of them afterwards.
Your map stays yours
Scout Bee reads the map as you left it, your own changes included. A follow-up such as “drop the transit part” changes just that and keeps the rest. A factor it kept from your map is marked From your map, so you can tell your choices from its own. And if a brand-new question leaves off a factor you had added by hand, a row called From your map offers it back as a chip - “Add back Transit stops”, say - so nothing you built quietly disappears.
Ask in your own language
You can type in German, Spanish, French or Dutch, and the answer comes back in that language. The numbers are checked against the English Scout Bee wrote first, and a fold called Scout Bee's original wording keeps that English one tap away. The card's own headings and buttons stay in English, and a question in any other language gets its answer in English.
1
Scoring: “where should I open?”
This is the classic question, and it is what the score is for. A score is a 0–100 rating given to every hex in the city, worked out from the things you said matter. Here is the request, typed exactly as a person would say it out loud:
I want to open a specialty coffee shop in Houston. Where should I look? I want plenty of people around, lots of offices nearby, and not too many coffee shops already.
Scout Bee reads that as three separate instructions, finds the matching data for Houston, and reports back what it is about to do before doing it:
The answer and its map: three factors, how much each one counts, and which direction each one points. (Taken from an earlier version of the answer card; today's lays the same facts out as described above.)
Read the answer slowly, because it contains the whole idea. It says the map is scored by Total (residents) at 40%, Corporate Office at 40%, and Coffee Shop at 20% - and the first two are marked high while the last is marked low.
In plain English: More is better and Less is better
Every factor points one of two ways. More is better (“high”) means find me lots of this - you want customers, so more residents is better. Less is better (“low”) means find me where there is little of this - you do not want to open next to four existing coffee shops. Same data, opposite direction.
Those percentages are each factor's importance, and they always add up to 100%. In the settings panel each one is also said in words - Very important, Important or Less important - next to its percentage. Together they are the honest answer to “how did it decide?”: a hex with lots of residents and offices but three coffee shops already will score lower than an equally busy hex with none.
What Scout Bee wrote into the ordinary settings panel. Every slider is yours to drag; the map re-scores as you move it.
On the map itself, brighter yellow means a better match and dark purple means a worse one. If you want to know why a particular hex scored what it did, hover it. The hover card gives the score out of 100 (“Strong match · 87 out of 100”, for example), then one line per factor: how many points it added out of the most it could add here, and where the hex stands on it among the other hexes (“in the top 10% of hexes”). A last line names the factor that held the hex back most.
The hover card as it looked when this guide was first written, with raw values. Today it shows each factor's points and where the hex stands on it instead.
2
Changing your mind costs one sentence
The first answer is rarely the last one. Rather than hunting for the right slider, you say what changed - and Scout Bee keeps the rest of the conversation in its head:
Make the offices signal count twice as much as the other two, and rank the top 10 areas.
It does not ask which offices, or which two, because it already knows. Offices go to 50% with residents and coffee shops at 25% each.
And because you asked for a ranking, the answer lists the map's Standouts: ranked groups of nearby high-scoring hexes, each outlined on the map and named after its neighborhood, in exactly the order the map ranks them. Tap a Standout in the answer to see it on the map, or press Ask beside it to send “Tell me about this Standout” as your next question.
A follow-up, not a new question. The factors carry over; only how much each one counts changes. (Taken from an earlier version, which listed single hexes rather than Standouts.)The same city, re-scored, as an earlier version showed it: numbered badges on the ten strongest single hexes. Today the answer outlines the map's Standouts instead.
In plain English
Importance is relative, so you can talk about it the way you would to a colleague: “twice as important”, “mostly families, a bit of footfall”, “forget the transit part”. You never have to work out the percentages yourself.
3
Cross two: two measures on one map
A score blends everything into one number, which is exactly what you want for a shortlist and exactly what you do not want when you are trying to find a mismatch. That is what the Cross two map (a bivariate map) is for: it shades every hex by two measures at the same time and leaves them separate, so the interesting corners stay visible.
Show me a bivariate map of Houston: where people live on one axis, and how much retail building space there is on the other, so I can spot places with lots of residents but little shopping space.
Two measures, one map - and Scout Bee says which one went on which axis.
The key is a three-by-three grid of colors. Move right for more of the first measure, up for more of the second. So the pale bottom-left corner is “not much of either”, the dark top-right is “lots of both”, and the two off-corners are the ones worth staring at: plenty of residents, very little retail space - or the reverse.
The legend. Right for more population, up for more retail space - and the corners are where the stories are.Houston by residents against retail space. The teal spread is where people live without much shopping nearby; the purple veins trace the commercial corridors.
When your question points at one corner - lots of residents, little retail space - the answer lists the Standouts where that combination gathers the most hexes, so you get a shortlist of neighborhoods rather than a whole city of color to read.
In plain English: “But the units are different!”
They are - people versus cubic meters of building - and it does not matter. Each axis is ranked only against itself, so the two are never added together. You are reading the pattern, not the arithmetic.
4
Territories: who is actually within reach?
City-wide maps are for finding candidates. Once you have a specific address, the question changes to “who can actually get here?” A territory answers that: an area drawn around a point along real streets - everywhere within a 15-minute walk, a 10-minute drive, two kilometers, whatever you say - with everything inside it totaled up.
Draw a 15-minute walking catchment around 6100 Main Street in Houston.
Scout Bee looks up the address, draws the walking catchment along real streets, and says what it drew. Everything inside it - residents included - is counted in the catchment's dashboard, one tap away under Open full dashboard. One message draws one catchment, so a second address is a second message. Ask for several times at once - 5, 10 and 15 minutes - and it draws catchment bands instead, one inside the other. And if it can't find an address, it says so and asks you to tap the map where the catchment should start.
Two addresses, two totals: about 5,490 residents within a 15-minute walk of one, 9,276 of the other. (An earlier version answered both addresses, and their residents, in one message; today each address is its own message, and the totals are in each catchment's dashboard.)
That gap is the entire point. Two Houston addresses a little over three miles apart, both perfectly respectable - and one has nearly 70% more walk-up population than the other. Notice too that the shapes are not circles: they follow the street network, so a freeway or a bayou that nobody walks across genuinely cuts the area short.
The two 15-minute walking catchments, drawn along real streets rather than as circles.
Every area you create is listed in the Areas panel with its travel time and size, so you can rename, hide, or delete any of them - and add more to compare.
The Areas panel. Scout Bee filled it in, but every control is the ordinary one you would have used. (The location search box shown here has since been removed; today you press Drop pin and tap the map.)
Open any area's full dashboard and you get everything inside it, counted: the area in square kilometers, the number of named places, the total building space, and a breakdown of what kind of buildings they are. For the 6100 Main Street walking catchment that is 2.9 km², 1,299 named places, and 10.6 million cubic meters of building - led by medical and education space, with retail near the bottom. That tells you what sort of neighborhood this is before you have visited it.
The dashboard for one walking catchment: size, places, building space, and what kind of buildings they are.
Scroll on and the same area is broken down by people rather than buildings: age bands, household types, marital status, families with children, and the local population mix - all from public census data, all for the exact shape you drew.
The same walking catchment, described by its residents instead of its buildings.
A note on the numbers
These come from public census and open map data. They are excellent for comparing one neighborhood against another, and they are not a substitute for standing on the corner at 8am on a Tuesday.
5
Market share: how much of it would I win?
Territories tell you who is nearby. Market share tells you how those customers split when your competitors are reaching for the same people. Ask for it and Scout Bee opens the Market Share tool for you; you place your stores and theirs, choose how far customers will travel, and the tool works out who wins whom.
I run two coffee shops in Houston and I want to see how much of the market they win against my competitors.
Scout Bee switches the map to the market tool in a fresh project, so your existing work is untouched, and asks you to place your own stores first, then your competitors. It never places a store itself - more on why below. For the figures in this section, two coffee shops (1200 McKinney Street and 2800 Kirby Drive) and two competitors (500 Dallas Street and 3400 Montrose Boulevard) were each given a 10-minute driving catchment.
The headline: your stores capture about 55% of the demand in play. (An earlier version of Scout Bee placed all four stores from their addresses and ran the analysis itself; today you place the stores and press Calculate market share.)
On the map, each shop gets its 10-minute driving catchment. Where two of those overlap, the hexes are shaded by who is likely to win the customers living there - blue shades for your shops, red and orange for the competition.
Four 10-minute driving catchments over central Houston, shaded by who is likely to win the overlap.
Then the report puts a number on it:
55.0%
My market share
122,808
Customers my shops capture
223,236
Total demand in the catchments
And it breaks that down shop by shop. “Exclusive” customers are the ones only that shop can reach; “contested” are the ones inside more than one catchment, split between the shops competing for them.
Store
Whose
Exclusive
Contested
Captured
Share
2800 Kirby Drive
Mine
41,168
35,830
76,997
34.5%
3400 Montrose Boulevard
Competitor
7,331
43,721
51,052
22.9%
500 Dallas Street
Competitor
14,703
34,672
49,376
22.1%
1200 McKinney Street
Mine
11,144
34,666
45,811
20.5%
Read across the top row and the story writes itself: the Kirby Drive shop wins 34.5% of the market almost entirely on exclusive customers - 41,168 people no competitor in this analysis can reach. The McKinney Street shop, downtown and hemmed in, wins 20.5% and has to fight for most of it. If you could only keep one, you now know which.
The full report: your share, the split, and a ranked line for every store in the analysis.
Two more numbers are worth knowing. Contested demand - 148,889 people here - is how much of the market is genuinely up for grabs rather than locked in. And cannibalization - only 863 people in this case - is how many customers your own two shops are taking from each other. A low number means they are well spread; a high one means you have opened next to yourself.
The report also describes the contested area as a territory in its own right: 46.2 km², 25,226 named places, and a full demographic profile of the people living in it. That is the ground you and your competitors are actually fighting over.
Who lives in the contested area - the ground genuinely in play, profiled like any other territory.
Decision support, not a forecast
Market share here is a model of pull - closer and stronger stores win more - not a sales prediction. Use it to compare options and see the shape of a network, and expect reality to have opinions of its own.
6
What it deliberately will not do
Scout Bee will not place your stores for you - not by guessing, and not from a list of addresses either. Ask for a market-share analysis and it does something more useful:
I'm thinking about a bakery in Houston and I want to check market share, but I'd rather drop the pins myself.
It sets up what it can - then stops and hands you the map. (Taken from an earlier version, which also suggested a catchment; today's answer simply asks you to place your own stores first, then your competitors.)
It opens a fresh project so your existing work is untouched, arms the map for clicking, and waits. You drop your own pins, pick the catchment that suits your business - a short walk for a bakery, a drive for a garden center - and press Calculate market share to run the analysis on real stores.
Your pins, placed by you. Scout Bee did the setup; it did not pretend to know where your bakery is.
Why this matters
Where your shops are, and who you consider a competitor, is knowledge only you have. A map agent that guesses produces a confident, professional-looking report about a business that does not exist. This one asks.
The same honesty covers the things it can't do yet. Ask it to keep only hexes with at least 2,000 residents and it answers “I can't set a threshold for you yet”, then points you to the Range button and Only where … in the map's settings, which do exactly that. Ask it to build a Your formula map, or to read a file you added under Your data, and it says it can't - your file stays in your browser, so Scout Bee never sees it - and names the control that does the job instead.
7
Every answer is a link
Notice the URL in each of those Scout Bee screenshots. Every setup Scout Bee builds is written into a link that rebuilds the whole thing - factors, importance, catchments, store pins, the lot. Paste it to a colleague and they open your map, not a screenshot of it. They can then make one factor more important and send it back.
That also means you can keep working by hand at any point. Scout Bee is a faster way into the map, not a separate mode you get locked into - the tool panels stay exactly where they were, and so does everything you had already set up.
Sentences you can copy
Swap in your own city and business. Each one opens a different part of Scout Bee; the last is simply a good way to find out what a city has before you ask for anything.
Site selection
“I want to open a specialty coffee shop in Houston. Where should I look? I want plenty of people around, lots of offices nearby, and not too many coffee shops already.”
Adjust what matters
“Make the offices signal count twice as much as the other two, and rank the top 10 areas.”
Cross two
“Show me a bivariate map of Houston: where people live on one axis, and how much retail building space there is on the other.”
Walkable areas
“Draw a 15-minute walking catchment around 6100 Main Street in Houston.”
Market share
“I run two coffee shops in Houston and I want to see how much of the market they win against my competitors.”
Just asking
“What can MapBees tell me about Houston?”
Where it still gets things wrong
Scout Bee is marked Beta in the panel, and that is not decoration. Three honest limits:
It sometimes picks a near-miss measure. Ask for “offices” and you might get a specific kind of office rather than the one you pictured. The answer names exactly what it chose, so check it - and tell it to swap.
Address lookup prefers full addresses. “6100 Main Street, Houston” is reliable; a landmark name on its own is less so. Give it a street address when precision matters.
Ask again if an answer looks thin. The same question can occasionally come back as prose with no map attached. Rephrasing, or simply asking again, usually fixes it - and Undo means a wrong turn costs nothing.
None of these are dangerous, because nothing is hidden: the answer says what changed, the panels show it, and Undo puts it back.
Every term, in one place
Bookmark this if a word ever trips you up.
Scout Bee
The AI map assistant built into MapBees. You describe what you are looking for in ordinary words, and Scout Bee sets the map up for you.
Hex
One hexagon on the map, about 350 m across (roughly 0.1 km²) - the size of a few city blocks. The map is split into equal hexes, and every number - people, shops, buildings - is kept hex by hex.
Measure
One number per hex: residents, coffee shops, offices, transit stops, building space, and so on. A measure used in a score is called a factor.
Score
A 0–100 rating for each hex, worked out from the factors you said you care about. Brighter hex, better match.
Importance
How much one factor counts compared with the others, said in words - Very important, Important, Less important - next to its share of the score. Making one factor twice as important means it counts twice as much.
Standout
A ranked group of nearby hexes, outlined on the map and named after its neighborhood. When you ask Scout Bee for a ranking, the answer lists the map's Standouts in the order the map ranks them.
More is better vs Less is better
More is better means 'find me lots of this'. Less is better means 'find me where there is little or none of this'. Every factor is set to one or the other.
Cross two map
One map shaded by two measures at the same time (a bivariate map), so you can see where they line up - and, more usefully, where they do not.
Territory (area)
An area drawn around a location - for example everywhere within a 15-minute walk - so you can total up who and what is inside it.
Catchment
The area a shop can realistically serve. MapBees draws it along real streets, not as a circle.
Market share
Of all the customers in the area you analyzed, the percentage your stores are likely to win.
Contested demand
Customers who sit inside more than one catchment, so several shops could plausibly win them. They get split rather than handed to one shop.
Cannibalization
Customers your own stores take from each other because they sit too close together.
The whole thing, in six lines
Open Scout Bee at the bottom-right of the map and describe what you are looking for.
Scout Bee finds the right data for your city and shows its answer before anything changes.
The Score map ranks the whole city and the answer lists its Standouts; Cross two compares two measures; a catchment totals up one area.
Market share splits real customers between your stores and your competitors'.
It never places your stores - it opens the market tool and hands you the map.
Undo reverses anything, and every setup is a link you can share.
You do not need to know what a hex, a catchment (an isochrone) or a gravity model is to use any of this. You need a sentence about what you are trying to do.
Scout Bee is the AI map assistant built into MapBees. You describe what you're looking for in ordinary words and Scout Bee sets up the map for you - choosing the data, how much each factor counts, and the map type - then shows exactly what it changed and how it read your question.
Do I need any mapping or GIS experience to use it?
No. You type a sentence such as "I want to open a coffee shop in Houston where there are plenty of people and offices but few coffee shops", and Scout Bee builds the map. Every term it uses is visible in the panel and explained on the page.
Can Scout Bee do market share and territory analysis, not just scoring?
Yes. It scores a whole city and lists the map's Standouts, compares two measures on a Cross two map, draws Fair share, Missing, Clusters and Variety maps, draws a travel-time catchment around an address, and opens the Market Share tool so you can place your stores and your competitors' and run the analysis.
Will Scout Bee guess where my stores and competitors are?
No, and that is deliberate. It never places store pins itself. Ask for a market-share analysis and it opens the Market Share tool in a fresh project, arms the map for clicking, and hands the pin placement to you.
Can I undo what Scout Bee changes, or share the map?
Both. Every change comes with an Undo that restores the previous map exactly, and a Copy link that rebuilds the same map - factors, importance, catchments and pins - for anyone you send it to. Scout Bee also keeps your own changes: a follow-up builds on the map as you left it, and a factor a new question left off comes back with an Add back chip.
Can I ask Scout Bee in another language?
Yes, in German, Spanish, French or Dutch, and the answer comes back in that language; a fold called Scout Bee's original wording keeps the English it was checked against. The card's headings and buttons stay in English.
Are the numbers a forecast?
No. They are decision support built on public census and open map data - excellent for comparing and shortlisting neighborhoods, and meant to be confirmed with local knowledge before you sign a lease.
See it on a real map
The best way to understand the score is to play with it. The full app is on a Free Tier, with no sales call.
Builds MapBees's location-intelligence pipeline end to end — census and Overture Maps ingestion, H3 hex scoring, and the map interface — and writes the methodology behind every number on the site.
