Apiary Book – a free Android application for worldwide beekeepers that will help you manage your apiary and raise productivity.
At 42, after 20 years of a 9 to 5 job as developer in a software company, Bogdan Iordache from Romania, a small country located in southeast Europe, decided that his life can be different. A beekeeper with 40 years experience introduced him to the world of bees.
His life took a different turn. He moved away from computer screens, deadlines, and meetings to fresh air, nature, bees, travelling, sweet honey, healthy food, and less stress.
He had more time to spend with his family, learned different things and noticed that he was more and more attracted to bees and their spectacular life.
A beekeeping training course was the next logical step.
In 2014 he bought himself a beehive. Being a meticulous person, he took a pencil and a piece of paper and wrote down each and every action he took, everything he observed or needed.
But it wasn’t easy to always have access to these data. Wouldn’t it be easier to have an application in his phone to record everything and get instant help?
And so he returned to his first love: coding.
Apiary Book was born from this idea.
Within 2 years, worldwide beekeepers started to appreciate his app and helped him with translations. It is now available in 14 languages and the list keeps growing.
Bogdan Iordache kept an open mind and learned not only from his own experience but also from that of more than 50.000 beekeepers who downloaded it. Their feedback helped him improve important features of the application, turning it into the most complex, complete and innovative solution for apiary management.
Bogdan Iordache picture source republica.ro
In 2017 Apiary Book was the winner of Startup Europe Awards 2017, AgriTech section. In the spring of 2018 Bogdan Iordache participated in two business accelerators, one in London and one in Romania, and obtained two funding.
From a UK investment fund – Bethnal Green Ventures – the company earned £ 20,000 for 6% of the shares, and from GapMinder, a venture capital fund that entered this year on the domestic market targeting innovative start-ups, Bogdan received 25,000 euros, also for 6% of the shares.
Apiary Book – Android application for beekeepers
Apiary Book aims to provide a complete solution for the management of apiaries using a simple smartphone that everybody always has in his pocket.
An easy-to-use tool that can offer valuable data gathered from monitoring beehives (using IoT), subsequently analyzing them: number, health state and maintenance of each bee family, treatments carried out and any other operation need it in the field of beekeeping.
It has a friendly interface and anyone can easily define several apiaries (hearths), can add work-to-be-performed, harvests (honey, wax), colony movements, veterinary controls and others. With Apiary Book a beekeeper has 4 major advantages:
- Smart management of apiaries and bee colonies monitoring using smart technologies (IoT);
- System decisions based on data analysis and predictions (cost reduction, disease prevention);
- Traceability for production process of honey and other apiculture products, origin and certified quality;
- Transparent direct marketing to the final consumer (B2C) and the marketing chain (B2B).
Main features of Apiary Book
• 50 modules, graphs, statistics
• Record information on the number, health and maintenance of each bees family.
• Define several apiaries (hearths).
• Add work to be performed, harvests (honey, wax), colonies movements, veterinary controls and other.
• Check your Timeline – contains all beehive reports, to do actions, colonies movements, harvests, treatments and veterinary checks ordered descending by date.
• Rediscover what activities you did in previous years current month
• Share your dashboard with information about apiary on Facebook, Gmail etc.
• Find route to destination for pastoral trips (using Google Maps).
• Display the location of your apiary on map
• Current data weather and forecast
• Hive details: type, bottom, no of frames, state (active, stored, sold), source and status of the bees, family strength (weak, normal)
• Queen information: year, color, state (cell, mated), status (installed, accepted, replaced)
• Inspections of frames, bee family, brood, queen, drones
• Hive components: adds or removals of frames (new, with honey, bees or brood), supers etc.
• Notes: observations/comments for your apiary
• Feedings: addition, incentives of syrup, sugar syrup, patty, protein patty etc, quantity
• Print/Export to PDF, CSV
• Inventory
• Media gallery: images, videos
• Hive weight recordings
• QR code, NFC tag for hive identification
Bogdan Iordache continues to work at his application, determined to help all beekeepers from around the world with this easy-to-use digital tool and make better informed decisions, based on historical data, current conditions and best practices to minimize bee colonies loses and increase productivity.
He and his team are currently working at data synchronization between different devices using the cloud and at the development of a web version of it.
PROs of Apiary Book app
- Free-of-charge download for Android phones and tables, available on Google Play
- Much appreciated by beekeepers, who gave it 4.5 rating (on Google Play)
- It can be used by a single producer or a much larger beekeeping company, including data not only about honey but about all the other products of the hive.
- Monthly updates (new features, various improvements, bug fixes)
- Available in 14 languages: English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Greek, Serbian, Russian, Czech, Portuguese, Polish, Slovak, Turkish and Romanian.
- Detailed tutorials and Apiary Book Help Center available on apiarybook.com
- Email help at bogdan@apiarybook.com
CONs of Apiary Book app
- It is not yet available for IOS, though he’s working at this version and it will be ready soon. Click on the App Store button to register for the iOS version release!
- In the future there will be a fee for beekeepers with big apiaries.
“Thank you to all beekeepers that are using Apiary Book, I hope that you can take better decisions using this application and help bees!” (Bogdan Iordache)
Apiary Book encourages children to love bees
The application can be used as a pedagogical material, the developer has already attended open lessons where he spoke about beekeeping using this application.
Bogdan Iordache sets an example and teaches his son how to handle the frames and not be scared by bees (see picture).
These days, honey bees are in great danger. The Colony Colaps Disorder is real, no matter its true causes.
A beekeeper needs to know how to handle each problem: diseases, pests, invaders (like varroa mites), weather change, agriculture pesticides, falling bio-diversity, increasing costs of production, lack of information.
Apiary Book is a MindTheBees project, a project about life, youth, healthy lifestyle, natural food, nature, family. The main goal of MindTheBees is to raise the awareness of the youth on the significance of the bees in the nature, educate the young generation about honey production and processing procedures, and promote the interest for beekeeping activities.
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