A call to see if anyone is using, or has used, or knows anyone else involved with any of this (Broodminder esp.).
And Hi to all of you still here, there's a lot missing!
And Hi to all of you still here, there's a lot missing!
Broodminder and other tech.
- Thread starter Dave Black
- Start date
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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
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:
Interesting to see this thread come back to life - Dave's original question about attitudes toward tech is still the real one. Alexey, going hardware-free is a genuine tradeoff worth sitting with: no sensor cost, no battery or connectivity headaches, but also nothing you didn't manually log. I went the other way - on-hive sensors, temperature and audio, computing statistics on-device - mostly because I wanted a signal that doesn't depend on remembering to open the app after an inspection. Different bet on where the real friction in monitoring lives: manual entry, or not knowing something's wrong between inspections. Curious which one NZ keepers actually run into more.