👁️ Observability of bee colony

Probably the biggest problem for the beekeeper is that it is hard to make decisions without up-to-date and correct information about the colony development. See 🧑‍🚀 Actions beekeepers make

Gratheon approaches this through the web app as the colony record, beehive scales for continuous sensor data, and Entrance Observer for hive entrance activity.

And many other conscious decisions. In addition to awareness, observability needs to be done fast and sufficient:

• Timing. It is easy to miss a colony change if your inspection window is infrequent. Inspections need to be done 10 days or less to detect slight changes and trends. Bees brood, queen and swarming lifecycle is important. See for example 🐝 Queen cup detection
• Attention. Beekeeper needs to have cohesive information about all frames as well as colony development dynamics to plan any changes. It is hard to have sufficient attention in the field

Beehives as a black box

What do beekeepers do? They try to write down colony state on a paper and put it inside the hive.
Or they try to use standardized physical templates to keep track of hive state, for example:
https://stock-karte.de/en/products/pin-stock-card-english-incl-pins-and-screws