How we got here

In 2018, two researchers from the American Bee Journal sat down with a group of beekeepers to discuss what they viewed as the most potent opportunities for the industry. At the top of the list were items like honey marketing and research, business plans for urban areas, and the use of local associations for advocacy. While technology was listed as a going concern, opinions were divided on the value of existing tools. “Technology is not a fast solution,” one beekeeper said, so while tools like artificial insemination, and RNAi were potentially valuable as ways to secure genetic diversity among queens, such solutions were merely “another tool in the bucket.” Another beekeeper echoed this sentiment, arguing that while, over the last three years, they’d witnessed a growing acceptance to the use of technology in the hive, it was still clear there were no quick answers. Across the board, the same sentiment was shared: to be truly useful, the technology still needed to evolve. 

Six years later and the tune at any major beekeeping conference has changed. On top of the stage at the recent ABF in Reno, for example, influential beekeeper Bret Adee spoke about hive-level record-keeping as a potentially “transformative” solution. "Beekeepers used to keep records on the yard level,” Adee said, “but now they are doing it at the hive level, with great technologies that make it possible." Adee suggested that record keeping was beginning to facilitate an important shift—from a decent, albeit time-consuming, way to keep track of yard-level information, to a precision tool that helps beekeepers understand operation-level issues with the benefit of hive level data. In other words: the recent evolution of technology has caught up with its original ambition. At ABF, Adee said that hive level tracking is the best way to determine which management practices are working, and that now the insights go far beyond what was previously expected. 

At Nectar, this shift raised a question for us: what happened? What was the driving shift between 2018, when technology was barely mentioned as a solution, to 2024, when industry-leading beekeepers were arguing that hive-level tracking is driving the future of beekeeping? 

The start of the shift

The story of how modern beekeeping came to face its current set of challenges starts, for many, in the 1990s. As monocropping and pesticide use accelerated, the pollination services industry boomed, driven by the meteoric rise of almond production. Whereas beekeeping had previously been an industry driven by honey sales, very quickly pollination began to be the market leader, which required beekeepers to shift the way they managed their hives. Stationary beekeepers quickly became migratory, but migrations began to exacerbate existing hive problems, from pests and varroa infestations to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The public story was that ‘the bees were dying,’ but the industry understood the problem was largely a matter of economic sustainability. Many beekeepers had to scale up their operations significantly. For nearly a decade, countless articles explained to the world that something needed to change, but it remained unclear exactly what that change would be.

Many beekeepers' first attempts to adapt to these realities involved yard-level tracking with spreadsheets, complemented by the use of third party tools like Google Maps, time tracking software, and hunting tools like Onyx Maps. These systems were effective ways to keep track of hive numbers and record the dates of certain management practices, but they also had limitations. While they were beneficial for seeing how much honey was produced at a given location, for example, or visualizing whether a major die-off of hives had occurred, the records were often filled with data entry errors, and their relevance fell apart if the hives moved or were split up. By referring to records in the previous years, yard level tracking could be helpful for scheduling the timing of management practices for a coming season, but the records required constant updating and manual data entry. The data in spreadsheets was replaced every time a new value was entered into a cell, and information transmission between the field and the shop often led to double entries.

So around the time the researchers published that article, in 2018, a number of beekeepers opted to go deeper by building their own technological solutions. For example, after he discovered a cluster of dead hives following a move, Lambs Honey Farm owner Ryan Lamb attempted to build a custom tracking system using RFID tags. Lamb and his team would scan their hives before leaving Texas, and then scan them again once they arrived in holding yards in North Dakota. The idea was to see if there was a difference in mortality depending on where the hives had been previously. But after two years of using the system, something happened: the data was corrupted. Two years of tracking history was lost overnight. “We went through all the effort and expense of doing it,” Lamb told Nectar, “but eventually we just shrugged our shoulders.” 

Brandon Hopkins from WSU has a similar story. Observing that large operations needed to utilize technology to operate efficiently, Hopkins attempted to build a scanning system with RFID tags that would give beekeepers a 360° view of their operation. In his words, “it was very similar to what Nectar is now.” But after two years of building the tool, he realized that building software demanded far more than expected of him so he gave up the project. “When you build a shovel, you can use that shovel for a long time until it breaks, but it’s not the same with software,” he said. “I didn't understand the updates and the constant work it requires.” So instead of building his own tool, he opted to support Nectar as an academic advisor. 

The common thread of these stories is that, while yard-level solutions solved certain problems, and many beekeepers were satisfied with spreadsheets for a number of years, their limitations ultimately drove some beekeepers to search for more granular hive-level solutions. But the first attempts at devising these systems were often designed piecemeal by combining publicly available tools—putting airtags on their hives for tracking, for example, or using hunting apps to map yard locations. Because these systems were being used in ways for which they were not designed, their long-term utility was at constant risk of failure—which inevitably happened in the form of corrupted data, or simply that the systems were too complicated to maintain. So despite the effort, the results were marginal at best. For many beekeepers, the relative effectiveness of yard-level tracking, combined with the difficulty of assembling a workable hive-level tool, led to a general hesitance about making the shift. These beekeepers understood the value of hive-level data, but there were no available products to make these data sets practical for commercial beekeeping.

Toward hive level tracking

Wesley Card is a 2nd generation beekeeper based in Louisiana, who manages over 28,000 hives split between two operations, Merrimack Valley Apiaries and Evergreen Honey Farm. No stranger to the value of data, Card has been tracking his hives digitally since 2004, starting with an Excel program that forced him to manually enter all of the yard information, eventually shifting to an app-based system in 2013. As Card told Nectar, that program allowed his employees to enter data, but there weren’t a lot of controls, so it generated a lot of errors and required Card to spend six to eight hours per week compiling the data into formats that he could use. This precipitated their shift to the Bee App in 2018, which minimized his data entry burden, but only tracked his hives at the yard level, which limited the number of insights Card could generate. “We shied away from hive level data for a long time,” Card says, “because the number of data points was mind boggling to even touch.” In Louisiana, he explained, they manage over 230 yards, which was a lot of data to keep track of by itself. So the thought of switching to a hive-level system on 28,000 hives, “each with its own set of data,” was intimidating. 

But recently, Card changed his mind. After reflecting on his biggest cost—genetic selection among queens—he came to understand the potential value he could extract from hive-level tracking. Basically, he explained, “if you can catch a few pieces of critical information, you can say, well, this queen produced 3000 cells that went to the field and went to these 3000 colonies. This queen produced 8000 cells that went to these 8000 colonies. Then a year later, across these macro scales, you can say whether one's better than the other.” And, if there’s a big difference in productivity, the savings can be enormous. Acceptance rate among queens is a number one cost driver for us, Card said, which can be the difference between a great season and bad one. “Genetics and breeding are at the forefront, and I think we can breed our way out of a lot of problems better than we can treat with chemicals or anything else.” 

A similar sentiment was shared by Nick Groenhoff, the owner of Shoreline Honey Farm based in Michigan. In 2023, Groenhoff grew frustrated with his Excel-based tracking system because, although he was able to accurately track hives in his own yard, once they were placed on semis and sent to California, all of the data was scrambled. “Every year we’d go to California, it was almost like a reset for the operation,” he said. So he decided that hive-level was the way to go. 

After only one season of using Nectar, he discovered a number of insights that challenged his existing assumptions about what was affecting his hives. Specifically, he learned that apple pollination was producing higher mortality rates than blueberries—the opposite of what he’d expected. He also learned that one of his pollination clients had resulted in a significantly higher mortality rate than the others. At the start of the season, Groenhoff explained, he split up a single batch of bees between two farms and one had 40% hive losses while the other had 10%. “So you can tell from that there's something going on at that farm,” Groenhoff said. “If you get one insight like that every year, that'll pay for the whole subscription.”

On hive level beekeeping

The premise of hive level beekeeping is that each colony is a separate living social organism whose story needs to be captured in order for a greater understanding of the operation and its management to be understood. Under the conditions of modern beekeeping, where hives are moved around constantly and exposed to thousands of elements from different pesticides to temperature fluctuations, it’s no longer possible to account for all of the factors that influence bee health without proper record keeping. The sum of forces acting on a hive are simply too diverse. Yard level analysis is helpful because it keeps track of hive numbers and records the date of certain management practices, helping beekeepers visualize how much honey was produced at a given location, or identify that a major die-off has occurred. But analyzing an operation at the yard level tells you nothing about the effectiveness of queen replacement, for example, and it leaves the full picture of a hive's history under-developed, limiting the available information to only a few high-level details.

With hive-level tracking, not only is a 360° picture of a hive's historical inputs recorded, but when this data is extended over the span of a couple seasons, it can often reveal patterns that reshape core operational assumptions. For example, instead of prioritizing a certain crop or queenline variety based on instinct, multi-season data can help prove that certain approaches work better than others. Instead of evaluating the mortality risk of fulfilling pollination contracts with single-season data which might be circumstantial, you can easily visualize the long-term patterns. Accumulating data in a single place allows beekeepers to go beyond inference and guesswork and towards verifiable science—which is even more important as operations scale. As Glen Card put it, with this kind of system, “the fundamentals are just more accessible, more well known, and applicable.”

For some beekeepers, like Andry Drange at Drange Apiary, the shift is generational. Based in Montana, Drange had been running his hives in the same way for decades, until his son Spencer entered the business and began advocating for hive-level tracking. Along with a field hand named Noah, Spencer had been running experiments on a number of hives using a custom-built tracking system with an RFID scanner. They were running experiments to see if they could find any worthwhile difference in hive outcomes that they could apply to the rest of the apiary. But once they discovered Nectar, they realized that the system had integrated all of the main features that they’d been trying to build on their own. So they switched. As Drange said, they asked themselves, “why reinvent the wheel?”

The big shift that’s driving older generation beekeepers toward hive-level tracking systems, Drange said, is that after ten years of being unreliable, the systems are simply getting easier to use. “Computers and me? We barely get along,” Drange said. But now, “the technology is easier to understand for us in the older generation, and less complicated to use.” Adopting these kinds of changes is also a way to incentivize the younger generation to stay in the beekeeping business, Drange said, by allowing young people to have an impact on changing business practices before the generational transition has occurred. 

Drange’s son Spencer saw things in a similar way. “Beekeepers are a historical creature,” Spencer said, who often feel that “this is how we’ve always done it and that’s how we want it to stay.” But now, the technology is so developed that “if we use it to the fullest, I think it’s going to be a game changer.” The features Spencer was most excited about were the ability to measure the take-rate of individual queens, and the ability to program all of their drops into the system to better communicate with H2A workers. “It’s really taken all the technology that we’ve been running already, and just simplified it all into one app,” Spencer said. He expects the system to be “a huge time saver for us.” 

Three Waves of Digital Beekeeping

At Nectar, stories like these have helped us to understand that the current shift in beekeeping is part of a larger industry evolution. We see hive-level tracking as the second phase in a three wave progression pointing in the direction of smarter beekeeping. Here’s the image from the top again.

The First Wave was defined by tracking systems that used spreadsheets to record high-level yard information. One step beyond paper-and-pen notes or a whiteboard, these systems helped beekeepers monitor honey production and analyze mortality events, but required manual data entry, and produced outputs that fell apart when yards were split or moved. Often these systems were combined with other tools for mapping and worker time tracking, which siloed key operational details. Often, the data was filled with errors, which limited the experimental value of the tracking tools. 

The Second Wave—where we are right now—is shaped by platform integration and hive level tracking. The tools previously used on their own are combined into one, with an interface that’s easy to use. Tracking takes place at the hive level, and combines data for movement history, queen breeding, treatment plans, and more, plus managerial data like worker efficiency and crew outputs. Beekeepers make real-time decisions from data-driven insights more effectively, allowing them to split-test the effectiveness of certain practices scientifically, and plan their operations remotely to cut down on costs. This is the model that Nectar is currently building.

The Third Wave is only just starting to emerge. Though this wave is still in its infancy, it’s defined by the shift from reactive beekeeping to prescriptive beekeeping. Using artificial intelligence, it will combine beekeeping data accumulated over multiple seasons with environmental data sources, like weather patterns and air quality. With enough beekeepers contributing to the platform, analysis will begin to take place at the industry-level, enabling widespread pattern recognition across operations that improves conditions across the board. 

Precision beekeeping is about moving beyond instinct and toward forecasting – reshaping traditional beekeeping practices by rooting them in science.

Adopting these kinds of measures is critical, says Brandon Hopkins, a researcher at WSU, because the environmental conditions affecting bees are continuing to become more challenging. “There’s no way the environmental landscape conditions are going to get better,” he said. “There’s more and more people, greater urban expansion, higher demand for food. So we’re not going to suddenly get back to a bunch of beautiful wildflower areas for bees.” And with climate change accelerating, the urgency is increasing. With Florida getting eight inches of snow, Northern California getting these super high heat events in the summer, “all of that affects forage and colony survival,” Hopkins said, “and the ability for beekeepers to sustainably maintain their bees.” 

But for the beekeepers that opt to act now, Hopkins says, there are a lot of opportunities. “As beekeepers become more accustomed to it, the data set will only improve. And so the value is just going to keep getting better and better,” he said. Managing operations on a hive by hive basis is necessary, because colonies are simply shuffled around too much. So while beekeepers might still make decisions on a yard by yard basis, the information for each hive that’s in that yard can help make that decision. “Beekeepers that are stuck in their ways, or not finding new ways to be efficient will fall behind,” Hopkins said.

At Nectar, these are precisely the ideas that drive our approach to software. We envision a future where hive-level tracking across hundreds of thousands of hives can inform the best practices across the entire industry. While there’s much further to go, and many tactical systems to be worked out, the signs are pointing to the fact this shift is going to be transformational. “I do feel that this is the future with AI,” said Wes Card. “It’s still too early to fully realize all the benefits,” he said, “but I feel confident that the opportunities are definitely going in that direction.”