Crownboard Hive Log

About

Record every hive inspection with your gloves on. Queen, eggs and brood are tapped, frames are counted by holding a button, and nothing has to be typed, so what you saw under the crown board is written down before the lid goes back on. Queen, eggs, open brood, capped brood and queen cells are each seen, not seen, or not looked for — and each of them begins at not looked for. A colony is never written down as short of a queen because you ran out of time to find her. Temperament and strength are five buttons each, from not rated up. The frames you actually pulled are counted on their own rows — brood, capped honey, pollen, uncapped stores, drawn empty, foundation, and the frames covered in bees — and holding the plus keeps counting, so nine frames of brood is one press rather than nine taps with a gloved thumb. Twenty-six things you might have done, from feeding to taking a super off to combining two colonies, are ticked from a list. Nothing at all is required: a date on its own is still a record that you were there. Mite counts are kept beside the sample they came from. An alcohol wash, a sugar roll or a sticky board; how many mites you counted; how many bees were in the jar, or how many days the board was under. That becomes mites per hundred bees, or mites a day, so a count in May and a count in August can honestly be compared. The app sets no threshold and names no treatment. Those follow your region, your season and whoever you take advice from, and they stay yours to decide. Photographs are held by the app itself rather than pointed at from your camera roll. Empty the roll and the record still has the picture of the queen cell you wanted to think about. Any photograph can be written back out to your library, so this is never the only copy either. Your yard is the first screen: every hive in every apiary, each row saying how long it has been since that lid was off — today, nine days ago, three weeks ago — because a bare date makes you do arithmetic in a veil. Swipe a hive to go straight into its form; save, and a bar offers the next hive in the same apiary. A numbered stand goes up on one screen, as far as the unlock allows. Search finds a colony by its notes, its queen's origin, its equipment or a photo caption. Reminders are the ones you write yourself, on the date you choose; the app proposes none. The yard can be shut behind Face ID, Touch ID or the passcode. A colony that died out, absconded, was combined, was sold or was shut down is archived with the reason and a note written at the moment you decide it — robbed out in September, comb kept. It leaves the yard list and keeps every visit, photograph and box it ever had. When the season turns, when an inspector asks, or when a colony is sold on with its history: one visit prints as a sheet, a hive's whole life prints with or without the photographs, every inspection leaves as a spreadsheet, and a backup file carries the pictures themselves so a new phone can be handed the lot. None of that is ever locked, whatever you have or have not paid, because an app that can hold your own records back is the wrong app for this. Records travel between your own iPhones through your own iCloud; they go nowhere else; to hand a history to someone you export or back it up and share the file. Beekeeping apps are mostly rented by the year. This one is free for two colonies, with one optional in-app purchase, made once, for more. The two get the whole thing above, not a demo of it. What it deliberately will not carry: a treatment calendar, a mite threshold, a registration rule or a seasonal schedule. Those are set by other people, revised without notice, and wrong inside an app is worse than absent. Write down what you did; judge it yourself. What is written here is your own account of a colony on a given day. It carries no authority beyond that, and it is neither husbandry advice nor an official return.