Much More Than Record Keeping with HiveTracks (S6, E52)

S6, E52 - Much More Than Record Keeping with HiveTracks

Kelly Parker: I'm Kelly Parker, President of the Red River Valley Beekeepers. Welcome to the  Beekeeping Today Podcast from beautiful Perley, Minnesota.

[music]

Jeff Ott: Welcome to  Beekeeping Today Podcast, presented by Betterbee, your source for beekeeping news, information, and entertainment. I'm Jeff Ott.

Becky Masterman: I'm Becky Masterman.

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Thank you, Kelly Parker, for that wonderful Minnesota opening. Becky, we're going to have so many Minnesota beekeepers sending in openings after our or I should say your plea. I don't know if we can handle them all.

Becky: I'm still pleading.

Jeff: [laughs]

Becky: Thank you, Kelly. I love hearing from Minnesota beekeepers. Red River Valley, that's a great place to make some honey.

Jeff: Is it?

Becky: Oh, yes. I bet they're busy right about now. They're out there putting on supers. I hope they're listening to us.

Jeff: It brings up a whole topic, Becky, especially as you get into more different yards and you start monitoring your honey production and what's going on with your bees, how do you keep records?

Becky: That's a really good question. I do like a spreadsheet, so a lot of my planning and inventory goes into a spreadsheet. Then I'm really guilty of after I inspect a yard, I'll do a really quick summary, a video recording of what's going on. That information is a little bit harder to track because I have to listen to my video. Then, of course, I use that really complex arrangement of rocks and bricks.

Jeff: [laughs]

Becky: If a brick is standing on end, it's queenless. It needs a queen solution, which--

Jeff: You don't look confident in that answer. [laughs]

Becky: I'm always, "Is a brick better or my memory?" Because if the brick gets tipped over, it's not going to magically have a queen in the colony, is it?

[laughter]

Do you have a better system?

Jeff: I have used it seems just about everything, including trying to use the bricks. Even when I was a young guy, my kids used to tease me and call me Forgetful Jones from the  Sesame Street character because I just can't remember the morning. I'd go back out to the bee yard and I wouldn't remember, "Well, okay, that brick is in which corner?"

Becky: [laughs]

Jeff: "Now, what does that mean? The right corner means everything is right. If it's in the left it means that nothing's--" [sighs] Then I get so frustrated. I'd throw a rock somewhere. Then I went to taking a pencil and writing inside the cover. That didn't work after a while because the pencil faded or got covered with propolis or whatever. Then being the tech guy that I am, I said, "I will start using spreadsheets."

Well, it all comes down to discipline, keeping up at it. To answer your question, I'm horrible at keeping records. That's why I like to censor so much, because it's there and I can’t take notes in the yard and they show up there on my graph. I want to go back to what you said. If you're doing these video logs of your bee yards, you ought to post those on YouTube or Instagram or something. We ought to keep up with your bee yards based on your--

Becky: Do you want to keep up? It's a real quick walking through. It would mean probably nothing to anybody. For me, it's more of a need another super or looks really good, going to have to split it or something like that. It's not quite David Burns' YouTube material.

Jeff: [laughs]

Becky: I'm afraid I would get a lot of thumbs down because it would be like, "Why are you sharing this useless information that is not educational?" It would be the opposite of what David Burns does for beekeepers. [laughs]

Jeff: David Burns being, of course, the guest we had last week or recently. I'm not sure the order of things, but it should have been last week the way these things roll out. Speaking of record keeping, one of the first record-keeping applications I remember coming across a few years ago was HiveTracks. We had James Wilkes and a couple of other people from HiveTracks on the show with Kim multiple times. Actually, I think they've been on once a year ever since we started the podcast. That's our guest today. HiveTracks keeps evolving. It's pretty exciting the work that they're doing.

Becky: I've been talking to James for a while because it's very different to keep bees personally than to keep bees in an operation. At the university, everything had to be very, very organized. What he does really lends to that organization, or what HiveTracks does. Maybe you and I are just going to get expire-- I was going to say expired.

Jeff: [laughs]

Becky: Inspired. Expired would be bad. Maybe we're going to get inspired and we're going to set our own personal operations straight after this talk with James and Max.

Jeff: I'm looking forward to it. I talked to them briefly at NAHBE this last January. They had some exciting products they're preparing to roll out. I look forward to hearing an update. Maybe, you're right. Maybe, we'll get inspired as opposed to expired.

Becky: Let's not get expired.

[laughter]

Jeff: It doesn't sound very good. All right. Let's hear from James and Max right after this quick word from our sponsors.

[music]

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[music]

Jeff: While you're at the StrongMicrobial site, make sure you click on and subscribe to The Hive, their regular newsletter full of interesting beekeeping facts and product updates. Hey, everybody, welcome back. Sitting across the big virtual Beekeeping Today Podcast table are none other than James Wilkes and Max Rünzel. Welcome, guys, to the show. I feel like I just talked to you a couple of months ago in Louisville.

James Wilkes: You did? Yes.

[laughter]

Max Rünzel: [crosstalk] It was nice. It was in the middle of a huge conference.

Becky: I wasn't there-

Max: Good to be back.

Becky: -so I'm glad that I get to be part of this conversation. Welcome, James and Max.

James: Good to be here.

Max: Thank you very much.

Jeff: We've had you as guests since our year one of the podcast, so it's fun to continue the tradition, James.

James: Happy to be here.

Jeff: You're not on your front porch.

James: Not this time.

[laughter]

Jeff: Very good. Thank you for joining us today, James and Max. For our listeners who may not be familiar with who you are, who HiveTracks is, can you give us a quick, short intro to your history in bees and then we'll talk about HiveTracks?

James: I'll go first. This is James. I'm a founder of HiveTracks. The original idea was in '08. For a digital platform, that's ancient, but that's when the original idea occurred and been iterating on the vision then of having technology give us as beekeepers an assist in our decision-making process. That's really what the original vision was, and that continues to be it. Technology has clearly evolved and HiveTracks has evolved with that.

My background. I'm a computer science professor in my 32nd year teaching at Appalachian State University. I'm on my downhill trajectory on that one, but it's been [laughter] a great career in computer science from pre-internet to now. In about the year 2000, I started keeping my own bees and started a sideliner family farm business in '05. That's grown to my son runs that now, about 150 hives.

I've got lots of hats that I've worn over the years to bring to the table and technology. There was a 10 or 12-year period in there with Bee Informed Partnership when that was going. I was an integral part of that as well. That's where I'm coming from. Again, lots of different lenses, views that I have into this. I'm still here. Still at it.

[laughter]

Jeff: Thanks. Max.

Max: Thanks so much. It's great to be here. It's great to be talking to you. I have a background in rural development and food and research economics. I started my career working for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy where I was based. I was working in research and extension, so an ample background in research and extension and really use of technology and practices of smallholder producers.

The biggest area I was working in was beekeeping, so most of the time was all about how can we catalyze knowledge and practices and how can we have technology and practices being used by beekeepers all over the world. It was a very interesting approach and I loved the work, but I felt there was a little bit of technology and data missing in the approach, I would say.

I had also felt that making PDF documents available to a beekeeper may not be the best possible way of getting the knowledge into their hands and getting it applied, so I was looking for some newer options. There was a professor from a university named James Wilkes who gave a talk. This is five years ago now, over five years ago. I loved what they were doing.

It's, actually, for us, particularly exciting because the vision that brought us together, which was basically talking about how what other purposes of record-keeping could be, the use of record-keeping to validate the origin of honey as an example and validate that on the blockchain is one of them, which we'll talk about today. That was the exciting conversation that we had back then that brought us together. The funny accent that I have is a German one. That's where I was born originally. I've now been living in Boone, North Carolina, and Western North Carolina for the last two years.

James: He hasn't quite picked up the North Carolina accent quite yet.

Max: [laughs] I'm working on that one.

Jeff: The German Appalachian accent would be novel.

James: Max is a language person as well. He has lots of languages in his repertoire, so don't let him fool you with just that German accent.

Jeff: [laughs] Well, very good. What is HiveTracks?

Max: HiveTracks in a sense is a mechanism or a tool, a digital assistant that runs in the background and allows the beekeeper to focus on what the beekeeper has to focus and to allow the technology to keep track of what we do as beekeepers in the yard, reminds us of what we can do or what we should be doing. The key three questions we focus on are, am I doing this right, is this normal, and what should I be doing next? We've learned that these are the key three questions that beekeepers struggle with. What we strive to build and work toward every day is to provide technology that helps with those three things to a beekeeper of any size.

James: I'll just add to that. Like I said, the original idea was to bring technology into the space and into the beekeeping world. It's been a lot of energy and effort in that direction for the last dozen-plus years. The technology itself has changed over time and HiveTracks itself has not lost that original vision. Back then it was web and cloud, really, was the new technology. Mobile was new. Since then the script has flipped. Mobile-first now, everybody has a device in their hand. Our focus too has shifted as a product that mobile app is the product now and the web is the secondary product, but in tandem with those are the features.

That's what we're really going to get into today that, as Max said, it's a tool, it's a mechanism in the background that we're giving to the beekeepers to help them do their job better in whatever way they're keeping bees. It's very flexible in the sense that you'll be able to use it as a tool for what your beekeeping is about, which we know there's lots of different reasons or ways people are keeping bees or purposes and that sort of thing. The tool itself facilitates that. That's really what we're after.

Becky: This tool is great for somebody with one colony and somebody with hundreds or thousands of colonies, correct? Also, it's great for a beginner and somebody who has been keeping bees for a very long time.

James: Of course, the answer is always yes from a software provider. Certain tools are better for certain groups of people. You're not going to use the same tool based on your scale. That's one thing, that we've built different tools for those different groups over the years and so we do have experience with all of those groups. The new mobile app product that we have out now, the newest product that we have out is for the smaller beekeeper.

Now, the web application that we can talk about as well, and it's termed HiveTracks Pro now, that is for really the broad range. It's for everybody, but it has additional features that allow people with more hives or the more commercial oriented because it's more of management of a broader operation, more people, that sort of thing, rather than just a few hives. The mobile app itself is focused on a few hives, is the sweet spot for using it, but for the beginner versus experience, it actually covers that whole span.

We've got enough flexibility in it that, there's fast paths through it if you don't want it to get in the way of what you're doing and you want to go through real fast or if you're not sure what you're doing and you want to go slower and you want some helps even what am I looking at here, what am I supposed to be looking at, we have that path as well. It is for, again, the beginners as well as experience in the mobile app configuration. Max, I don't know if you want to add any to that.

Max: Yes. Going back a little bit to what the beekeepers love of our app the most, and that's really the inspection feature, allowing beekeepers to inspect the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 hives they may have in their apiary. It allows really, one, we've gone through a lot of research and a lot of data to understand what are the key aspects of an inspection, what are the key data points that we need to look at, and what is the easiest possible way to answer the questions at hand.

For example, when we look at the presence of stressors or when we look at the food stores, you always have the ability to just fly through an inspection and say yes, no, or you have the opportunity to add more details or more data to say, "I want to be a little bit more nuanced in the way that I collect the data, in the way that I determine what is happening." Then we always have the opportunity for more guidance.

That's really what beekeepers like a lot, to see, "Show me again what a covered frame looks like. Show me again what unkept brood looks like," and then having the visual cue, the pictures to do that. That's then where the technology part comes in, which is so interesting, is that we know that there's a lot of factors that influence beekeeping. Mostly it's the location, and with location comes the weather aspect of keeping bees.

When you first download the mobile app, which is completely free, so I invite everybody to test it out, try us, and to give us feedback on what we've been working on over the last few years, the first step is to create an apiary to create your yard. In the process, there's really three aspects that are entered. It's the environment, the terrain. Environment mean more so am I in a rural area, urban area, suburban area? What's the terrain? Am I in the mountains? Is it a grassland backyard? Then it's the location of the actual apiary.

The location, in particular, is relevant because that allows us to pull in the weather information, to give weather forecasts either for the next week to be able to time your inspection with the optimal flying conditions of the bees. Then in addition to that, also to log with your inspection the time of day and the weather conditions that you had at that given time. This is, again, this notion to say how can technology aid. Technology can, one, aid to allow me to clearly see what I need to be looking for to remind me after the fact to keep track of.

If I monitored ants or I saw mites, for example, then that is something that the technology would tell me. Then the other aspect of what can the technology do in the background, which is something like pulling in weather information, looking at exactly the location where we are, the terrain, the environment, but also looking at, for example, blooming information that is in the area at the moment.

Really trying to find a good spot where all that we are focused on is to make technology, in the best case, almost disappear. You don't want to be thinking about technology, you just want it to be there and work, which is something that we've spent a lot of time on because it's something to get there. We're so used to easy technology, so it's actually hard to make technology just work. Our approach to design and work has always been make it disappear as much in the background as possible so that we leave the beekeeper with their ability to think about the hive and be in the hive and do what beekeepers do.

Jeff: Hold that thought, we'll be right back after these quick words from our sponsors.

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Becky: Max, can you expand on that? Say, I'm a beekeeper and I've downloaded the app, and I'm starting right now, say, I listen to the podcast and I'm starting right now, the end of June, tell me what that experience is going to be like.

Max: The easiest way to get started is to look on the Apple App Store, the Google Play Store, to look for the HiveTracks app, and then downloading it. Then the first step is creating an account. It's the first name, an email address, and a password. You can use social logins as well if you're more comfortable with that. Then the first screen you will land on is the apiary creation screen. It gives the date for the establishment and the name.

It's really visual and we've gotten a lot of nice feedback on the creation. You create the visual for urban, suburban, and rural. The environment that best describes where you are. Then for the next step, you look at the terrain. You look at what best describes-- can be coastal, any of the backyard, mountain, even rooftop, and even the option to add other. If there's really a category that you don't see in there, you add that one. Then you add your location. You can either add an address, you can either add your latitude and longitude, or you can just allow the phone to select where you are.

That's the baseline that creates the apiary or the yard. Then the next step that happens is to create your hive. The hive process is really when you get started with a hive, you, again, give it a name, you select the hive type. There's almost all the hives that are out there that you can select from. Then there's also another opportunity if it shouldn't be there. Then you can add additional information if you want to, or come back to add it later. We really allow for if you want to log your queen genetics, if you want to log exactly the configuration of your hive, how many deeps, how many supers, how it's set up, the color of it, queen marking.

You can go quite deep. You don't have to. You create that. Then the last step is you can multiply or duplicate the hives. If you have two or three, you don't have to go through the same process every time. You can just arrange them, tell the machine how many, or tell the app how many you would like to create, and you create them. The moment that has happened, you land on your home screen. The home screen is really-- that's where we spend a lot of time designing it and making it really appealing, the colors that remind of the environment, the background updates based on the environment and the terrain that you selected.

James: Even the weather, what the weather is in the background is reflective of the current weather as well.

Max: On your home screen, you can scroll through your different hives. If you have one or two or three hives, you can always look at what do you have coming up. What are the things you need to do, or what is the hive history? What are the things you've done in the past? The way we've organized the app is everything is managed through the home button at the bottom, where you can either create something forward-looking, which we call it to do, or you can create a record, something that has already happened, something that you want to log.

That's basically the core environment of the app, with then the ability to look at your calendar. That's one of the features, again, a weekly forecast for the weather conditions, a monthly view of all the actions and everything you've done. Then we have something else, it's currently in beta, we're exploring it, and I let James talk about that some more, which is what we call community intelligence.

Jeff: Are you sourcing your information from larger sources? The weather, the weather based on longitude, latitude, the environmental information, you're pulling in all those data sources to avail itself to the beekeeper wherever they are?

James: Yes. Location, we could veer off on location and why that's critical to beekeepers. I've written a blog about it and articles and things. Our location as beekeepers really determines the life of our hives. That is front and center what determines the success or the challenges or whatever is happening with your hive is your location. That is central to the app. The land use, the foraging area, what's around it, in combination with the weather is important to know as a beekeeper and to be aware of and helps guide your decision-making.

Just one more add-on to Max's. When you download the app, Becky, and set things up, then you're ready to roll. You go and whatever you're doing with your bees, then there's a place in the app to record that. If it's an inspection, you record the inspection. If it's some other management action, if you're harvesting or you're feeding or you're treating for Varroa or whatever, there's a place for that information.

Becky: What is the max in this program, max number of colonies we can put in?

James: There's probably a safety valve that somebody doesn't enter some ridiculously high number by accident, but we don't have a hard cap on it.

Becky: It's not necessarily if you just have two or three if you have more than that.

Max: Yes. There comes a moment-- Again, we always talk about that it's optimized for a certain type of use. I think the use case that we optimize for is really the number of hives per apiary. I think the moment you get to start into north of 20 hives in 1 apiary, it starts to be a little bit cumbersome to manage it. We have beekeepers who still do it that way and also are happy with it, but in terms of the guidance and scrolling through them, up until 20 hives, you're pretty well covered.

Becky: You can have seven apiaries.

James: You can have as many. There's no limits on any.

Max: Exactly.

James: Many apiaries, as many hives, and that's all free. Again, the mobile app is free, which is a new business model as of January. NAHBE is where we started that as well. We've iterated on different business models over the years, but that's the current one. If we have time at the end, Max might be able to speak to what the reasoning was behind that because it's mostly because of what our vision is downstream. That's why we've gone free. It's driven by that bigger vision in particular.

Jeff: I have two follow-up questions before we go into the community intelligence because that is probably a deep pool, one's at the micro level. Are you able to import information from hive sensors of different types and varieties into the HiveTracks app?

James: By import, if you mean we're tightly integrated with any of them, the answer is no. Are there ways to do that and have I mashed things up together? Yes. Quite often that's taking a screenshot or something of that sensor data. In particular, I use hive scales. When I go to the yard and get a scale reading, I'll take a screenshot of that scale reading and put it with the inspection as part of the record.

Then it's right there with it, but as far as tight integration, no, we're not tightly integrated with any of them, but again, this has been my mantra over the years, that's doable and we can do it and I expect it to happen at whatever time that either we're mature enough as a business or they're mature enough as a business to make it make sense. As far as is it possible? Absolutely, and it's been done in different ways before. I've tied strings with MiteCheck with Bee Informed Partnership. Bee Informed Partnership had a Hive Scale portal where the sensors were integrated into the Hive Scale portal.

Again, none of that's not possible, it's just whether the business environment makes it reasonable. At this point, that hasn't happened yet.

Jeff: Yes, there's no data standardization between all the different to make it feasible.

James: No, and we've talked about that. I think we had a whole show on that.

Jeff: Yes, I think we did. [chuckles] [crosstalk] I'm still beating that drum. [crosstalk] You hear it in the background?

James: If what data standardization processes look like, they are slow and tedious and need some driver. There needs to be some need, a market to drive it. All those forces, they're still working, but again, it's not mature yet. That's to me the best way to describe it.

Jeff: Yes.

Becky: Are you talking about standardizing the bricks and what they mean?

James: Yes, exactly.

Jeff: And the colors of bricks.

Max: And the colors of bricks [crosstalk]

Becky: And which side they're on, just checking.

James: Where do you write on the hives?

[laughter]

Jeff: Instead of tracking information by hive, can you track it by yard?

Max: Yes. The way it works that you can record anything for as many hives as you want to in a given yard. That's come in handy many times. You have one outlier, say, or you want to record an inspection for all the hives in your yard, except for one, you can do that, and then you just go in and record a second inspection for the second one. Whatever record you say, be it an inspection, be it a feeding, you can multi-select as many hives as you would like to in any given yard. Again, that saves a lot of beekeepers a lot of time, and then the information will show on each individual hive. If you fed all of them, you add that, it shows them the hive history for each of them.

James: That's one of the bridges to that next group, the sideliner group, is that multiple hives at a time or the apiary level. The web application, the HiveTracks Pro, that has those features, are going to be more central to that platform where in the yard you're at one yard with a mobile device, but then you're at the aggregate level on the web app. That's where some of those features make more sense.

Again, we understand what those needs are and have built products in that space. I've got a commercial product out there right now that's legacy that some folks are still using. It's all at the apiary level and not at the individual hive level, but those kind of things will meet in the middle to where you transition to the other apiary level.

Jeff: Thank you. Community intelligence.

James: Yes. Community intelligence is a whole area of focus that we've spent a lot of time on. In thinking about and planning, it's nothing new, really. Community intelligence is something that we do as beekeepers all the time. That's why we have beekeeping clubs with monthly meetings. Your community intelligence there is when you go to the meeting and everybody says, "Hey, what's going on with your bees?" Or a segment of the meeting is, "This is what's happening with your bees this month."

Well, a four-week break between knowing what's happening with your bees of monthly meetings, there's a lot that happens in between those that if you weren't aware or if you're new, or even if you're experienced and things are out of line with weather patterns or whatever, us talking to each other and communicating as beekeepers is something that's integrated in the way we keep bees. That's just part of the culture, I think, of beekeeping. You see it even in the commercial beekeeping groups, you can see they're talking about almonds, they're talking about what's the bloom going on.

To me, that's the concept that I want people to-- That's what community intelligence concept is, is just how do we communicate information about what's happening? Well, if you're using a mobile app and you're entering information about what you're seeing in your hives, what's blooming in your area, what are the Varroas like in your area, or what's the food sources looking like in your hives, all those kinds of things, if you bring that information as you enter it into the app, you bring it back to those people that are in your area, your geographic area, then you have this real-time flow of almost a newsfeed of this is what's happening in your area right now.

That's the concept. That component is in there in the app right now. It's going to keep being refined, if you will, as you get more beekeepers and you get a critical mass in a particular area where it begins to be more relevant to you. The more beekeepers you have on there, the more relevant it is, the more accurate it can be, and you can also sort out outliers, blah, blah-- There's all sorts of interesting things you can do to package that information to make it even more relevant and more valuable to you as a beekeeper but the framework is in there, the infrastructure's in there to make that happen.

Maybe at the highest level, that's what the community intelligence is that we're trying to orchestrate or architect in the app.

Becky: This is potentially like a big phenology project and year to year you're going to be able to collect data and note this is the earliest drones have been reported.

James: Becky, one other record that we have that is a whole window into that is we have what's blooming. Max, we already have some cool projects going on that right now. That might be a good place to veer off now, I think, but that concept of what's the timeline for, in this case, what are the beekeeping relevant events that are happening. You've created a beekeeping phenology, if you will, of what are the important beekeeping events in your area. In our east coast, when's the maple bloom? When are the dandelions blooming? When are the redbuds blooming?

You just track these signposts of what's blooming, but then what's happening in the hive? When's my first deep inspection? It's that nice warm day. As a beekeeper, you get a sense of when that is. You're waiting on that day, so you can record, when was that first time I went in? Then how does that line up with history once you get this going? Again, that's a real strong vision that I so want see happen.

Becky: It's so needed right now in the industry because you have a lot of newer beekeepers without that knowledge.

James: Yes, they don't have this track to just lay down next to, that this is what's normal, and how far outside of that am I? That's what I'm after.

Becky: This year has been one of the most unusual that I've ever seen. I did a divide in Minnesota in early March, which is insane, but I couldn't figure out what else to do, and I had drones to support it. That information, I've been using my Facebook page to share things, which is really not as effective as HiveTracks.

[laughter]

James: It's the right concept. It's this social platform, a social place where the beekeepers are together. The mobile app is going to provide that as well. That's the idea.

Jeff: The mobile app will be able to connect people based on the location they set up initially within the app.

James: Absolutely. Yes.

Max: Yes, that's the vision. I think this is actually a very interesting segue into we talk a lot about in terms of location and what is time, place, weather. The interesting thing there is that the journey that we're on is to getting a better understanding for the differentiation of different honey types and how-- In the wine industry, this is called  terroir. You know exactly where the grapes come from, you know what the weather conditions were, and then you choose your wine based on a type of grape. That is something where the honey industry trails, that knowledge, and that component.

Something that we've been working on a lot over the last year is how can we empower and enable beekeepers to tell that story in a better way. That's why we, this season, launched our Honey Stories. The ability to basically what beekeepers interact with their app, with their technology, with their hives through pictures, videos, anything that they do, could there be a means how beekeepers could tell that story to the world?

These honey stories that we created are basically an opportunity to customize and create your own honey story based on the records that you kept, which you can select based on the harvest that you record to create a QR code for every particular harvest that you carry out that you can tie to the honey that you're either gifting, you can create a unique QR code for the gift for Christmas of this is my spring 2024, or this is my fall 2024 honey and I want to have something unique with it or any other hive-related product that you would like to market. The interesting thing is that scanning the QR code that the HiveTrack pro generates for you, shows you your personal page, your own honey story of your creation. That includes the records you directly pull in that records your location. You can either show your exact location or an approximate location if you're more comfortable with that. Then a space for yourself, which is a space about you, your honey, your pictures, your items. That's the link between the daily practice in the hive and the person consuming the honey to understand, to get educated around what are the flavor tags that the honey has. What kind of flavors do I have in here?

What is the honey description, what is the plant descriptions that went into that to serve in this twofold means as an educational tool for the consumer of the honey and as a promotional and marketing tool for the beekeeper to tell their story through a connection that happens between the hive and the record keeping and then the spoonful of honey on the table?

James: It gives the beekeeper a tool to differentiate their honey from everybody else's honey. That's what I want. When my honey is sitting next to another honey and I've got a honey story, then the consumer can tell me, "I prefer this more information about your honey." It gives a reason to differentiate. Right now the labeling and everything, we know how messed up that is and how it's quite often abused and not used well.

That's just a rampant problem and the consumers are confused and have no idea. We're trying to create a way that gives the consumer a more legitimate way of understanding where the honey comes from and the beekeeper they're in control of it. It's not dependent on some other outside group doing it.

Becky: Is the National Honey Board supporting this work because they should be?

Max: Our email addresses will be in the Show Notes I guess.

James: I 100% agree and I hope they would at some point as it matures and as we get it out.

Jeff: I'll just add, I know from a varietal honey standpoint, the honey board was very big into that back in the '90s. Now, I don't know where it is today, but varietal honey is really the way for beekeepers to differentiate themselves from the store shelf honeys and even your neighbor's honey. If you have a floral source like Sourwood or something like that. You are familiar with that, right James?

James: I am. That's clearly our use case. Our primary use case is the sourwood honey that we produce. It's personal because I can go to a store here locally and my honey that I know is legit sourwood will be right next to another honey that says sourwood and I know 100% that it's not sourwood and there's no recourse to say differently until now. Now I have a way to do that.

Jeff: I think that the QR code and the ability to source the honey through the record-keeping in HiveTracks is a fantastic tool for beekeepers who are trying to market their honey.

Max: Oh, thank you. Thank you, Jeff. I think again, being true to our approach to letting technology disappear in the background, there's another layer to this which is we use in the background people have to choose in, we work with our partner organization Honey Trail, the organization we work to develop, this was just the Hashgraph Association to basically take when you're opted in.

Jeff: Which organization?

Max: The Hashgraph Association. That is the association that is behind the Hedera blockchain. The Hedera Web3 technology. Basically, what happens when you create your honey story and you opt into blockchain validation, every time a record gets stored to the database, it gets validated and then written to the blockchain. If you wanted to look on an immutable ledger, that's what the blockchain technology does.

It allows to validate any type of record that is being saved in a way that you know it hasn't been tempered with. That's something that we just launched, which we are incredibly excited about to give not just, again, the beekeepers, the ability to tell their story, but also the ability to validate that each of these entries are actually being made they contain the location information, they contain the relevant information. Where the concept here is, again, if you take enough data points, the data points will tell the story about the honey validation.

If we have enough data points and you've cared for your bees enough times throughout the year, it becomes different layers of data that in a sense, as a cobweb become unique little validation points that together tell the story about the origin of the honey that can then be independently validated or verified on blockchain technology. Again, all of this happening in the background.

You may not understand blockchain technology fully or you may not want to understand blockchain technology fully, but it's a pure matter of clicking the button, opting in, and in the background, all the validation happens and you can just showcase and click on it and you see how your records have been validated and done that. Then this was for us really important to make sure this is something, again, it shouldn't make anything more cumbersome. It should be there as an additional layer of validation, but it's not something that you would need to study for or take an evening course to make sure that you could use that.

James: Another way that, I like to think about it, is that this is a body of evidence that you're collecting to say this honey is my honey. This is what's true about it. When you're talking to somebody at a farmer's market and they're asking questions as you should do about the honey, where it came from, how you're keeping the bees what's your history, how can I trust you? It's really a way to export the trust that we have as beekeepers in ourselves. When we produce the honey, we know what we were doing. We know we were there and so how can we capture that information and export it?

That's really how I see this and there's layers of evidence and we can just add more and more stuff into that bucket of evidence and it just gets stronger and stronger the more data. The long phrase for this is data-driven honey authentication. Or blockchain back to data-driven honey authentication. It's all this evidence that then comes into play in the marketplace. We believe it's a technology solution to help address honey and honey sourcing and that sort of thing, a real differentiator and we can make it as strong as we want. The blockchain is another layer of strength in that equation. Without getting all the way, but that's the idea.

Becky: Would that be more directed to bigger operations as far as an impact on the industry?

James: I think the blockchain part for sure. Actually, our best use cases for those or the strongest use cases for those right now are actually in like say Ethiopia or some place like that with smallholder producers and giving them a mechanism to authenticate their honey. We have some cool projects going on there right now. That's why I'm mentioning them, that those are ones that I think those would happen first or small scale like me with Sourwood.

The big packers and the bigger commodity honey industry, I think that it would get there eventually, but I think the first use cases have to be in these special cases and even for the boutique honey producer who wants to use it as a marketing thing. If they're in some interesting market that their consumers care about that thing, then they would want to use that blockchain validation or just the data-driven itself. Again, let the market sort that out and I think it will eventually go into the bigger market once we've got the fundamentals in place and prove it out that this is valuable.

Max: Working with the smaller producers, I think the specialty, the varietals, Jeff, as you said before, I think there's so much, again, we have this vision of sharing honey stories of unique varietals around the world. That's again, we have a white creamy honey from the Tigray region in Ethiopia or the Sourwood here. There's so much richness and diversity in the different types of honey and just seeing the different colors of the different shades of honey that you can enjoy and so much that we just don't know about yet because honey is something that you picture honey and it has one color.

That's just how, at least in the Western world we grew up to it unless you are in a very specific region and there's an honoring of a local variety. That's like being able to produce a tool that allows us to celebrate that diversity in honey making and allowing smaller producers of varietals to showcase and share their honey story. That's the starting point.

Becky: Brilliantly said. I'm sorry. I'm just very excited. If say I have a yard and I'm pulling honey three times a year, is this system going to be able to separate out those three different harvests?

James: That's up to you. Yes. I do that myself. I have a wildflower honey, that's a spring wildflower, and I have a wildflower that's a summer wildflower. Wildly different flavor profiles. As a producer of a product, I have those very different parts. Now, I have a tool that can say, "Okay, this is the spring version and this is the summer version. These are the flavor profiles of that." Yes, you can produce a different honey story for each harvest even.

Max: The way it works, Becky, is that we have what we call the honey story and what we call the harvest profile. You match the two together. Every time you harvest, you create the harvest profile and you can just call this spring, fall, the flowering. Then the honey story, think of it as your story, your brand, "This is Becky's honey." Then it just gets updated every time you create a new harvest profile or you want to shift it a little bit.

Then you create a unique-- the QR code that is a combination between the honey story about what you do with your pictures and videos, and the harvest profile that is unique to that specific time of the year. You can, for yourself, decide how many records do you want to pull in, do you want to pull in every inspection or just the harvest, just the harvest record? That, again, allows you to take two building blocks that you can combine.

Some beekeepers, again, and we said earlier, it's either about you have the Valentine's edition as a special gift or the Christmas edition, or when you actually sell your honey--

James: Or a wedding favor, or something like-- You could do a special QR code for that, a honey story for that wedding.

Max: Or if you have different partners, you sell to a restaurant, and you want to talk about the great cheeses that you can combine with this honey, or you have a different taste. Again, there's an infinite opportunity, and already, we're super happy to see all the creativity, what the beekeepers have. Just seeing what they're coming up with and how they're using it, and that's what makes-- When you build something, that's the coolest part when you're like, they take it into directions, beekeepers use that with creativity, imagination that is just heartwarming.

Becky: It is so exciting. I bet everybody wants to start the year over now, download the app.

[laughter]

James: We hope so.

Jeff: So many different ways, Becky, in so many different ways. This is really fascinating. Anyone who's listened to the rest of our episodes together, I tend to want to listen to talk data for hours. This is the world I live in sometimes, but we're coming up to the end of our time. Is there anything that you want to talk about in the few remaining minutes that we haven't discussed yet?

James: Max, you have to talk about biodiversity monitoring.

Max: There is one thing. We started last year with allowing beekeepers to capture flora, the floral diversity in the backyard. We've started now to implement a machine learning algorithm that allows people to see what was being detected when any type of flower is in bloom. It's a little bit like other flower detection apps that are out there or the Apple phone already does that in it. Really with the goal to understand what is the floral diversity and the floral abundance, or what blooms around an apiary.

Now, we're going steps further. One, we allow to create a flowering site within the app that allows to capture the pollinator buffet or the pollinator garden that you've planted in your backyard to keep track of, again, to build this knowledge, the phenology knowledge basically around what blooms. We're now also adding the ability to track other pollinators, native and wild pollinators that occur and come in gardens or in troughs to be able to determine what is the actual biodiversity and the health of wild pollinators diversity in flowers and the health of the hive surrounding.

That is what we're working on is to say, can there be a live window into biodiversity corroborated by thousands of beekeepers around the world who are then receiving and seeing, basically as we create this live map of biodiversity that determines how the bee health is influenced by foraging availability and flowering resources and the availability of native and wild pollinators that occur, that are outside of the managed pollinators that we already know.

Really, as a starting point with the mobile app and as a means to create the community to go a little bit further because we know how much the environment depends upon the bees, and how much the bees depend upon the environment. Getting a better map and a better capturing of that relationship is how we're diving deeper into the biodiversity side of things.

Jeff: This is why I like having you back every year.

[laughter]

Jeff: The whole--

James: We're not very static, I'll just say that.

[laughter]

Becky: This is very exciting.

James: In some sense, yes, we're still here. We've still got the same vision but we're pressing it further and further all the time.

Jeff: I think there are answers and pulling together all the diverse data sources and AI is the buzzword of the year so far, and being able to pull that into the mix, and I'm sure you guys are working on that. It's some dark secret level on a chalkboard somewhere.

Becky: Well, don't make it creepy, Jeff.

[laughter]

Becky: There's nothing creepy about this.

James: I'm imagining that it's better.

Jeff: It's in the sunshine in the backyard at the movie theater on the big screen. I'm looking forward to these updates. I really look forward to hear and to see what HiveTracks has for us in the future because I know it'll make my job managing and keeping my bees a little bit easier, or at least I'll know what I'm doing wrong.

[laughter]

James: Well, we want it to be even more than that. We want you to feel like, and we want all our HiveTracks community to feel like they're contributing to the knowledge base by using the app, by participating with us, we're solving the problems because of how we're recording the information using the app, it's providing information and data that's going to answer the questions that we have about our bees and about the bees interaction with the local ecosystem, the impact of the ecosystem on the bees.

That all, there's answers to what's going on, and drawing the lines between those, that's really the vision that we're after, and we're confident that we can get there.

Jeff: Will you come back and share more information with us down the road?

James: Of course.

[laughter]

Max: As soon as you want us to.

Jeff: Absolutely, the door is always open. James, Max, thank you so much for joining us today.

Max: Same here, likewise. Becky, Jeff, thank you so much.

Becky: Thank you so much for what you're doing, you're really helping beekeepers.

Jeff: Becky, we started this conversation with bricks And blocks on hive tops and we ended it basically with blockchains.

Becky: Chains. [laughs]

Jeff: They're the theme throughout the show.

Becky: I have dibs on my new honey label called Blockchain Honey. I think it's just going to interest people.

Jeff: You better reserve that name as a domain name.

Becky: I think that it's going to really gather some traction and not to mention it's going to be trackable. I have some great hope. That was such a lovely update. When you get into being able to dedicate yourself to a tracking system, and then at the end, it helps you sell your honey. I think that is just such an exciting development.

Jeff: I do too. I first saw something like this on the back of a bag of coffee. I thought, "I wonder where these beans really do come from." He scanned a little QR code and it talks about wherever the part of the world it came from, and it enabled me to enjoy the coffee a little bit more. To provide that information for my customers, my Olympia honey company customers, I think it'd be fantastic.

Becky: I'm really excited. I think about every year at the state fair, the Minnesota honey producers have the honey booth, and people are overwhelmed with all of the different varieties and the different brands. To date, I don't know that there's any detailed information to this extent. Now, I'm sure it's going to pop up more and more, but it seems like an easy way to generate that information and share it.

Jeff: If you had two jars of honey, a standard consumer, two jars of honey, one had a QR code, tell you a little bit about where it came from and a little personal story about the beekeeper, perhaps, the floral sources, and one that just said, "Jeff's honey, which one would you choose?" I would choose Jeff's honey.

Becky: I was going to say, "I know you, so I would probably go ahead and buy Jeff's honey," but maybe I'd buy both because I feel guilted into buying your honey, but then the work the other beekeeper put into their honey-

Jeff: Purchasing through guilt.

Becky: -I would have to. [laughs]

Jeff: Well, I guess I shouldn't have used my name as a reference, but the point being, if you had just a generic jar of honey versus a jar of honey with a story behind it, the story behind it would be the decider.

Becky: I do tell people, the honey that I extract in one specific apiary, it always tastes the same but it's a very special taste and it's very different than honey that I collect in the other locations and so to be able to take that information and actually put some data behind it, that's pretty exciting.

[background music]

Jeff: That about wraps it up for this episode. Before we go, I want to encourage our listeners to follow us and rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, wherever you download and stream the show. Even better, write a review and let other beekeepers looking for a new podcast know what you like. You can get there directly from our website by clicking on the reviews along the top of any webpage.

We want to thank our regular episode sponsors, Betterbee, Global Patties, StrongMicrobials, and Northern Bee Books for their generous support. Finally, and most importantly, we want to thank you, the Beekeeping Today podcast listener for joining us on this show. Feel free to leave us questions and comments at the Leave a Comments section under each episode on the website. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks a lot, everybody.

[background music]

[01:01:07] [END OF AUDIO]