New features, research partnerships, conservation milestones, and everything happening in the HivePulse community.
The regional health map in the Members tab no longer shows hard-edged rectangles. Each area is now a soft, round patch of colour that fades out towards its edge and blends into its neighbours, like a real heat map. It looks the same on the website, Android and iPhone, and you tap or hover over the middle of a patch to see the figures behind it.
The website, the iPhone and Android apps, the e-mails and the beekeeping year are now also available in Polish, with the usual beekeepers’ words: pasieka, rodzina pszczela, przegląd. Pick Polski in the language menu or in your profile. A native speaker has not read everything yet, so if a word sounds odd to you, tell us.
If you sign in with Apple or Google, an invitation sent to that address is already waiting in your apiary list. Tap Accept, done. The envelope icon is gone from the apps’ toolbar; a link from an e-mail is still redeemed at the end of the apiary list.
On the apiary page of the iPhone and Android apps there was no way to add a hive unless you scanned a printed QR code. Now the amber New Hive button is there, as it is on the website: name, type, date and notes, and the hive exists. The sticker still opens and sets up a hive as before.
A new timeline shows what a beekeeper does month by month: feeding with candy in February, the first inspections, swarm control at least every 9 days, drone frames against varroa, when to move for rapeseed, acacia, linden, fir or heather and when to extract each honey, and the preparation for winter. It scrolls endlessly, opens at today and speaks your language. Give your country and postal code and every date moves to your place; you can adjust it by hand. The dates are guide values, not rules, and medicines are only ever as approved in your country. On the website and in both apps.
The start of the apiary list now tells you what matters: when the next inspection is due (counted from your reminder interval), how your hives are doing — fine, to watch, or alert, with the reason — and which treatments are coming up. You can plan a treatment for a single hive or for all hives of an apiary, with the product and the day, and tick it off when it is done. Once in a while the same spot can carry an announcement from us; there is no advertising network and nothing is tracked. The website has it now; the apps follow with their next versions.
Migratory beekeepers can now move hives as one action: pick the hives, the new place (an existing apiary or a new one, with an address), the day and the forage, from acacia and rapeseed to fir and heather. Every move is kept. Each hive shows where it has stood, and a map of moves draws the journey of every hive, numbered stop by stop. Only the owner of an apiary can move its hives. When hives shuttle between two places, a shortcut sends them back to where they stood before with one tap. The website has it now; the apps follow with their next versions.
You can now invite another beekeeper to work on an apiary with you, or on single hives. Enter their email address, they accept, and they see what you share: they can record inspections, edit hives and see the figures, and everything they enter shows their name. Only you can delete, invite others or put the apiary on the public map. If you ever delete your account, an apiary you shared goes to the person who accepted first, so what you built together is not lost. Sharing is on the website now and comes to the apps with their next versions.
A batch of QR codes you generated by mistake, or never printed, can now be deleted on the website, and in the iPhone and Android apps with their next versions. A batch stays as long as one of its codes is stuck on a hive, because scanning that sticker is how the hive is found again.
You can now sign in with your Apple or Google account, on the website and in the test versions of the apps: Apple on the iPhone and the website, Google on Android, the iPhone and the website. If your email address is the same, you land in the account you already had, with all your hives. The email form is still there, as a quiet link under the buttons. HivePulse only ever receives your name and address from them, never a password.
The server keeps a set of open lines to the database so it can answer quickly. Those lines were being closed from the other end during quiet spells, and the server did not notice — so the first request after a break could fail with an error, an apiary that simply would not load. Our own monitoring caught it in the test system before any beekeeper met it. The server now checks a line before it uses it and quietly opens a fresh one when needed. Nothing to do on your side.
HivePulse is finished, but not yet in the stores — and that is not for want of trying. Before Google lets a new developer publish an app, twelve people have to test it for fourteen consecutive days. So the test round is the gate, not a formality. If you keep bees and own an Android phone or an iPhone, you can get the app now and help it reach everybody else: there is a page explaining what it involves, what to report and what happens with your data. It takes a quarter of an hour to set up and one visit to the hives to be useful.
The fonts used across the site were loaded from Google servers, which means every single page view handed your IP address to Google before a word was rendered. They are now delivered from our own servers, so nobody outside learns that you visited. One of the four fonts turned out to be loaded with five weights and used nowhere at all, so it is gone too — a little less to download on your first visit.
When an app closed itself in the middle of an inspection, nobody found out unless the beekeeper wrote in. Both apps and the server now send a report when something breaks: the place in the code, the app version and the kind of device. What they deliberately leave out is everything about you — no inspection notes, no passwords, no email addresses, no IP addresses, no screenshots. A report names your account number and nothing else, and it is stored in Europe. The reports go to Sentry, which processes them on our behalf.
Brood and honey frames were entered with a plus and a minus button — on the iPhone those were the tiny system arrows, barely usable with gloves, and picking eight frames meant eight taps. Both apps now show every value from 0 to 10 as its own large button across the full width of the form. One tap sets the number, tapping it again clears it. The buttons are 60 points tall on the iPhone and 68dp on Android, comfortably above what a gloved finger needs.
Buttons and cards in the Android app showed Android's default lilac in a few places — the plus and minus buttons for brood and honey frames, and the statistics card — because the app never told the system which colours to use for those surfaces. They now follow the HivePulse amber and stone palette like everything else. The apiary list and the QR batch list also leave room at the bottom, so the last entry is no longer hidden behind the round button.
An apiary could only be put on the public map when you first created it — in the iPhone app not even then, and editing an apiary on the iPhone quietly discarded your changes. Both apps now let you edit an apiary at any time, including the "Show on public map" switch, and your changes are saved. Only public apiaries appear on the community map and count towards its figures. On the website, news posts now appear in your language, the Asian hornet photo in the hornet tracker is back, and the top navigation no longer cuts off the download button with longer German or French labels.
Recording an inspection at the hive is now quicker. Colony strength is a simple choice of weak, medium or strong, and varroa is recorded as none, low, medium or high instead of a mite count — both in the iOS and Android apps and on the website. Your earlier entries were converted automatically. The queen colour is picked by tapping a coloured dot. And you can finally edit a hive's name, type, acquisition date and notes directly in the apps, not only on the website. Strong colonies now save correctly in the Android app as well.
The website has a new look. The heavy dark green gave way to white and warm grey surfaces, and colour now signals what you are looking at: green for your apiaries and colonies, amber for notices, red for colony health and the hornet tracker, and blue-grey for statistics and help. The dashboard sidebar is light, figures are set in a clear monospaced font, and buttons are bigger and easier to hit. The HivePulse wordmark is rounder too. Nothing moved and every feature works exactly as before — it is simply easier on the eyes.
Logging an inspection on the iPhone showed only a plus and a minus for brood frames, honey frames and colony strength — the number itself was missing, so you could not see what you were setting. The number is back. The colony mood, queen colour and colony strength options also appeared in English no matter which language you used; they are now translated in German, French, Spanish and English in both apps. Hive weight is no longer a bare text box either: it keeps the keyboard for exact values and adds plus and minus buttons in half-kilo steps, for gloved hands at the hive. On the website, the mood chart legend was showing English labels too, and now follows your language.
The community box on the Members page waited for the global statistics before showing anything — and those statistics were being calculated with a separate database query for every apiary and hive, which took several seconds as the community grew. The server now gathers them in just a few queries, and the log-in or supporter prompt appears immediately while the numbers fill in.
The first time you sign in to the iOS or Android app, a short swipeable tour now introduces what HivePulse can do for you — QR codes on every hive, quick inspections, statistics, reminders and the hornet tracker. Skip it any time, and bring it back later from Settings with "Show guided tour again".
The iPhone app now uses the same amber-and-stone design and DM Sans typeface as the website. It also gained everything the Android app received recently: printable QR code PDFs that open right away, email reminders, the account-wide statistics overview, password reset links, managing your custom fields for all apiaries or just one, and — for supporters — the regional health map in the Members tab.
Tapping Download PDF on a QR batch in the Android app did nothing — the download was handed off outside the app and failed silently once your session had been open for a while. The app now downloads the printable PDF itself, saves it to your Downloads folder and opens it right away — and tapping again no longer piles up duplicate copies.
The Android app now has the same account-wide statistics page as the web dashboard — apiaries, hives and inspections at a glance, broken down per apiary for any time window. Supporters also get the regional health map in the Members tab, with the same varroa, mood, swarm and brood overlays as on the web.
A few things could previously only be done on the website. In the Android app you can now create, edit and delete your custom fields — for all apiaries or just one — turn on email reminders alongside push notifications, and request a password reset link without leaving the app.
The dashboard sidebar was hiding its entire navigation on small screens with nothing to replace it, leaving mobile visitors with no way to reach anything but a logout button. A new menu toggle now reveals your apiaries, stats, profile, and every other page from your phone.
Push notifications only ever reached the iOS and Android apps, leaving web-only beekeepers with no way to be reminded of an overdue inspection. You can now opt in to email reminders from your profile page — independently of push, so you can enable either, both, or neither.
Public apiaries created through the web dashboard only ever collected a free-text address, never GPS coordinates — so they were counted in the community totals but never rendered as a pin on the live map. The backend now automatically resolves a saved address into coordinates, so every public apiary with an address shows up on the map going forward.
A full forgot-password / reset-password flow is now live across the web dashboard, iOS, and Android — request a reset link by email, set a new password, and all of your existing sessions are automatically signed out for safety.
Every beekeeper tracks different things. Custom field definitions let you add your own inspection data points at the apiary or per-hive level, with support for text, number, boolean, date, and select-type fields — now available in the web dashboard, iOS, and Android.
You no longer need the mobile app to check in on your bees. The new browser dashboard covers login, your apiary list, hive detail with varroa charts, QR batch management, and personal statistics — all from a desktop or laptop.
The public live map now overlays a varroa-density heatmap — mite pressure aggregated across public apiaries in ~50 km grid cells, colour-coded green to red, so beekeepers can spot regional risk trends at a glance.
To protect beekeepers from potential hive theft, the public map and community pages now show the nearest city or village centroid instead of an apiary's exact coordinates. You still see your own exact location when logged in — only the public-facing view is fuzzed.