BeePlus Beekeeping Manager 4+

I find using pen and paper to make notes when inspecting a hive difficult – my notes are often illegible and the paper gets in the way. Using my iPhone to take photographs of each hive as I go along, then using the simple interface on this app means I am actually keeping much better records then I did previously on paper, yet the task seems much less onerous. I use the comments field a lot – I dictate a brief report then add to it once I am back home. I load up any photographs I want to keep – a newly marked Queen, a funny looking play cup that I want to keep an eye on etc , and that gives me a much better sense of my the state of play of my hives than any of my paper records ever did. It is important not to delete any of the photos that you upload – if you delete them in the photo app they are deleted from your hive records: this is a bit of a flaw but only a minor one. For the money I think this is great value and has made hive record keeping much easier.

I’m a new beekeeper with 2 hives at the start of spring and now upto 7 hives 3 months later. I found it difficult and messy keeping paper records but this app makes it so much easier. I’m going to print the barcodes to stick on the hives so I just need to scan each hive as I get to them.

Now that all my hives have been entered it should be a breeze to keep good records.

Really useful App has some great features like adding photos and exporting data. I’ve been using this app for over a year. Finance tool and note book tool is useful. To do list could be more useful eg tick complete. More pests and diseases could be added to the reference cards also only a few are shown. Mite count box could do with improving eg programming a ‘warning’ level and tracking numbers like we do frames of stores/brood. What would be this app great would be a log of queens. We can mark queen history in each hive but it’s not as useful as it could be. I’d like a log where you enter your queens name/number them and detail their heritage. Also detail which hive and marked/clipped etc.