Broodminder and other tech.

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maungaturoto
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hi dave. nice to see you back.
btw i liked the articles.

the missing......well i'm starting to wonder why i'm here. not even sure if i will continue to have bees at all.
 

Dave Black

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Bay of Plenty
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hi dave. nice to see you back.
btw i liked the articles.

the missing......well i'm starting to wonder why i'm here. not even sure if i will continue to have bees at all.
Yes, hard times indeed. Sometimes times I wonder if beekeepers would enjoy cold showers and winter skinny-dipping just as much. Anyway, having spent a bit of time at meetings of one sort or another I must admit to being quietly encouraged by some of the 'youngsters' I've met, so maybe just keep watching for a bit.
 
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Dave Black

BOP Club
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Not me personally... I was curious so ggggoogled it. Seems like a fad?
Hi Gino.

I can remember when people said Google was 'just a fad'! You might also mean that it's the Beekeeping version of 'pimp my ride' and there I think you're probably right, more style than function.

Nevertheless, I'm curious about the uptake in NZ. Broodminder has been on the market since 2015, other equivalents (HiveTracks, MyApiary etc.) even longer. It would be more accurate to say I'm interested in NZ beekeepers attitudes and thoughts rather than the products themselves, but a bit of both. So far, I have only heard what EU and US beekeepers say, and they are quite different breeds.
 
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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:
1788333333767.png 1788333347123.png 1788333363079.png 1788333390144.png 1788333416927.png 1788333473897.png
 


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