Activities

The project focuses on innovations such as new indicators, sensors and techniques helping to detect, diagnose or monitor these hive threats. This will be complemented with bee-friendly management strategies at the apiaries to diminish the risk or impact of the beetle, thus also reducing the need for chemical treatments.

One of the initiatives of BPRACTICES is related to the application “Hivelog – Keep it simple”, developed by the Danish Beekeepers’ Association. The project will integrate new functionalities into this tool, contributing to product (honey) traceability, which will help to add value to the bee-friendly strategies.

Additional information

Hivelog is currently a free and intuitive application specifically developed for beekeepers. It can be installed on computers and smartphones. The programme allows a fast and simple collection of the most important data of the apiaries. Thus, the beekeeper can keep record of relevant aspects of the apiaries, bee colonies, hives or frames regarding the bees` behaviour and state (e.g. presence of larvae, eggs, broodnest), feed, nucs, breeding, diseases, harvest, etc. Concerning health, there is a specific menu to monitor the Varroa parasite.



The application also includes a map, and the farmer or beekeeper can rapidly browse and explore the information by using the menus or navigating over the map. Apart from entering data, Hivelog has other features such as some basic statistical calculations, helping beekeepers to improve their knowledge of the bee farm. The application also allows alarms to be set. All this contributes to improve decision making and, at the end, the management of the apiaries. Finally the application allows to print or export data, for example to excel. The programme is currently available in nine languages.