Create and manage your bee colonies

Every colony with its own name, its own history and its own figures, instead of a row of identical-looking hives.

Anyone who keeps more than a handful of colonies knows the problem: at the apiary you still remember which colony was weak in spring and which one swarmed. By autumn you no longer do. Colony management in iBeekeeper records that history, colony by colony.

What belongs to a colony

For each colony you record the details that matter to you: name, hive type, frame size, origin, apiary, queen. You decide which fields you see; the details are fully customisable, just like the hive cards.

On top of that comes everything that happens during the season: inspections, treatments, harvests, photos, tasks. In the end you have one continuous record for each colony instead of scattered notes.

Colony groups: why they are more than a folder

Nucs, production colonies and breeding colonies need different attention and different details. A nuc in July is judged differently from a production colony during the main forage.

With colony groups you keep these stocks neatly apart, and you can give each group its own hive card form. With a nuc you want to know whether the queen is laying; with a production colony, how many honey supers are on. There is no limit to the number of groups.

Search instead of scrolling

In the app you find a colony with the search field instead of scrolling through a long list. With three colonies that makes no difference. With sixty, spread over four apiaries, it is the difference between looking something up and giving up.

Colonies that no longer exist

A colony that dies, is united or is passed on doesn’t simply disappear. It moves to the archive and is kept with its whole history.

That is more than tidiness: if you have losses in spring, you want to know what those colonies had in common. Apiary? Queen year? Amount of feed in autumn? Without an archive, that question can no longer be answered once they have been deleted.

Readable over the years

The real value comes from the second year onwards. Then you see not only how a colony is doing right now, but how it has developed, and you can compare colonies with each other instead of relying on the impression of the day.

Why this regularly fails on paper is explained in our comparison digital hive card versus paper notebook.