Hannah Thomas
How many times have you looked at your hives, and wished you knew more about what was going on inside?
For migratory beekeepers, the travel their hives undergo during pollination adds another layer of complexity to this question. Many are left wondering not only where their hives have been, but also how different locations impact the health of their hives.
The desire to understand this simple relationship, hive location versus mortality, is the driving force behind BeeTrack, the record-keeping smartphone app developed by Nectar Technologies.
Nectar was started with the desire to give bees a voice through collecting hive data. Initially the team developed in-hive sensors with the idea that by listening to what’s going on inside the hive, beekeepers could take more informed actions, make better decisions, and better cope with the challenges they were facing.
After a series of papers came out and painted a grim picture for pollinator health1,2, the Nectar team knew they wanted to develop a more impactful solution. Land degradation and reduced forage ability, likely due to monoculture and chemical spraying, were seen as primary culprits for rising honey bee mortality. We started to wonder, like many other commercial beekeepers, if we could tie hive mortality to land management.
We continued listening to commercial migratory beekeepers and researchers. After suffering significant mortality rates for a few years in a row, one of the biggest beekeepers in the world told us he wanted to know where his hives had been. There was no way to know if and where the hives had been exposed to sub-lethal doses of pesticides during one of the many pollination stops. The effects of that exposure likely only resulted in observably significant mortality rates months later, by which time the hives could have been moved to multiple places.
Since the Nectar team already had experience in the field implementing precision beekeeping technology, and through creating our own apiary Ferme Nectar (ferme means farm in French as Nectar is based in Montreal, Quebec), we knew the solution had to be low-tech and low-touch. The user would need to be able to collect data reliably and easily under the beating sun, with gloves covered in propolis, and bees in full flight. We wanted the technology to be accessible and usable by everyone. This led to the creation of the smartphone app, which is available in both English and Spanish.
The entire BeeTrack system is made up of the smartphone app, the manager’s portal where you can visualize your data, and durable QR/NFC tags for your hives. The tags are stapled onto the front of the boxes. Nothing needs to be placed inside the hive so you don’t need to worry about propolis. The app uses GPS to locate your phone in the yard where you’re inspecting the hives. The manager’s portal is where you can see all the data you’ve been collecting, and it’s designed to mimic the traditional whiteboards familiar to many commercial beekeepers.
While BeeTrack was conceived with the desire of tracking location versus mortality, we quickly realized it could help us with another problem we had been trying to solve – tying any management practice to its outcome.
Using BeeTrack you can log inspections for your entire yard. With just a few clicks, that one input of data also lives in the individual history of each hive in the yard. It’s easy to create specialized reports for problematic hives, and you can track hive health, feeding and disease-treatment practices, and more! BeeTrack is customizable, so you can continue to use the practices and terms your operation is already comfortable with. You can also choose to input as little or as much data as you want.
BeeTrack allows the beekeepers to collect their own data, and understand the effect of any location or practice on any outcome to make better decisions. With every season of logging practices and locations, you can see trends in location vs mortality, queenline genetics, honey production, and more – depending on the data you’re interested in collecting. Currently we have beekeepers interested in using BeeTrack to validate their low-touch beekeeping practices (where migratory operations aim to move their hives as little as possible), assess queenline genetics, monitor honey quality, and more. BeeTrack is also being used in research and academic settings. Project Apis m. researchers are using BeeTrack to evaluate best management practices regarding nutrition, varroa, nosema, equipment management, colony management, and more.
In developing BeeTrack, meeting and being in the field with migratory beekeepers has been the single most important way to learn. There’s no substitute for getting stung by bees, blinded by the sun, and having your entire phone covered in propolis. This field experience helps us to empathize with the beekeeper when it comes to daily micro-decisions, so that the tool is genuinely designed to fit the real world challenges of beekeeping!
While BeeTrack has been developed with the needs of commercial beekeepers in mind, backyard beekeepers will also be interested in the honey bee health research advancements that will come from the data. BeeTrack is currently being used in Project Apis m. – funded research involving 15,000 hives. The aim is to develop practical and regionally-specific best management practices for all beekeepers. In the future, BeeTrack could be used by researchers to work together with many beekeepers across a substantial geographical area. This colossal data set could give insights on changing colony health over a large region with implications for every beekeeper.
Users of the app are already able to conduct their own research after collecting data for just one season. One operation diligently tracked their queenline performance throughout 2021, across ten different queen types and almost 1000 hives. By also logging their deadout data, they determined that more than 40% of their deadouts occurred in hives with one specific queenline. They’re now considering not buying that queenline next year and are looking into alternatives. We’re looking forward to sharing more insights with Bee Culture readers as they develop!
When it comes down to it, BeeTrack is an agricultural production tool. It can record many of the practices in a beekeeper’s day-to-day routine, and works throughout the season from pollination to honey-pulling, to holding yards and over-wintering facilities. It shows the impact of beekeeping practices, however it is not the one-size-fits-all solution to all of the problems pollinators face.
Given the complexity of the challenges facing honey bees, we know that it will take more than one company or one technology to improve the state of affairs. Nectar instead believes that it can support its mission to secure the pollinated food supply by partnering with beekeepers, researchers, growers, and other stakeholders, to together design a system that leads to better outcomes for all – bees included. For example, as we head into winter, the fall deadout data typically starts to compile. We’re looking forward to working with our client beekeepers to evaluate the effects of different locations on their bees.
BeeTrack is still developing, and its design is continuously being refined to increase the ease of use for the beekeeper. At Nectar, defining a problem and trying to fix it is our core approach. The design process means spending the time to map out the solution to the stated problems of migratory beekeepers. It also means a willingness to shift that approach if it doesn’t line up with the real-life needs of the end user. It can be easy to get carried away with ideas, innovations, and solutions to the problems pollinators face, but it’s important to always return to actively listening to the needs of the target user – migratory beekeepers.
Interested in learning more about BeeTrack and how it can fit into your operation? Pricing is a subscription model based on the number of hives. Visit www.nectar.buzz/en/request-a-demo or send us an email at info@nectar.buzz. We’d love to hear from you!
