Actually, this is exactly the kind of discussion I was looking for.
My name is Alexey and I've been developing an apiary management app called
Apian for almost 5 years. It started as a simple queen-rearing calendar and gradually grew into a tool for keeping track of apiaries, hives, inspections, queens, treatments, feeding, equipment, tasks and colony history.
It's a bit different from Broodminder — there is no hardware involved. The idea is simply to make day-to-day record keeping easier.
A few things beekeepers seem to find useful:
- individual hive records and inspection history
- queen tracking and queen history
- treatments, feeding and tasks (individually or in bulk)
- apiary/hive movements
- equipment and boxes
- photos and notes
- RFID tags and QR codes for quickly opening a hive record
- voice inspection notes — speech-to-text and analysis are processed directly on the phone rather than sent to an external service
- the app doesn't require a permanent internet connection, so you can use it at remote apiaries
It's free to use for beekeepers who have up to 250 hives.
I've been getting feedback from beekeepers across Europe, but I'm particularly interested in what NZ beekeepers think. Different countries seem to have quite different habits around record keeping and technology.
If anyone is interested in trying it and telling me what's missing for NZ beekeeping, I'd be very interested.
Available for Android here:
Google Play
And I'm genuinely interested in the broader question too — do NZ beekeepers actually want this kind of technology, or is a notebook still hard to beat? 🙂
And few screenshots:
