Offline hive inspection logging for beekeepers

The idea

A hive inspection happens in gloves, in sun glare, often with no signal, and with both hands busy. So the record of what the beekeeper saw, queen present, eggs, mite counts, lives in memory until the drive home, where it evaporates. Two weeks later they cannot remember which hive had the queen cells, and mite treatment decisions get made on vibes.

HiveTracks and similar apps drifted upmarket toward commercial operations with fleets of hives and pallets of features. Hobbyists with 3-20 hives were left behind. The wedge is ruthless field usability: one screen, glove-sized toggles, fully offline, and a mite-trend chart that turns scribbled counts into a clear when-to-treat signal.

Who pays

Hobbyists pay 5 USD/month or 40 USD one-time, and this crowd happily spends hundreds a season on gear, so the price is invisible. RevenueCat makes offering both models trivial. Distribution: beekeeping associations and their newsletters, r/beekeeping, beginner beekeeping YouTube (huge and evergreen), and club swarm-season workshops where every new beekeeper is told to keep records and given no good way to do it.

MVP scope

• Apiary and hive setup with queen year and marking colour
• Single-screen glove-friendly inspection logging, fully offline via SQLite
• Auto-stamped weather from cached forecast
• Mite trend chart per hive with configurable treatment threshold and alert banner
• Treatment log and inspection timeline per hive
• Skip for v1: cloud sync and accounts, harvest tracking, equipment inventory, club sharing, Bluetooth scale integrations

Build HiveNote, an offline-first mobile app for hobbyist beekeepers to log hive inspections with gloves on.

Stack: React Native with Expo, SQLite (via expo-sqlite) as the primary local store, RevenueCat for subscriptions and one-time purchase.

Core flow: the beekeeper sets up apiaries and hives (name, hive type, queen year with marking colour). At the hive, they open the hive card and log an inspection through a single screen of oversized toggle and stepper controls sized for nitrile-over-leather gloves: queen seen (yes/no), eggs seen, queen cells count, mite count with sample size, temperament (calm/roily/defensive), brood frames count, honey stores (low/ok/heavy), plus an optional voice memo and photo. Everything works with zero connectivity; weather (temp, conditions) is auto-stamped from the last cached forecast for the apiary location. Saving takes two taps maximum.

Screens: apiary list, hive card with inspection timeline, the big-button inspection screen, mite trend chart per hive with a treatment-threshold line (mites per 100 bees, threshold configurable, default 3) and a treat-now banner when crossed, treatment log, settings, paywall.

Implementation details: SQLite is the source of truth, no account required to start; cloud backup is a later concern. Chart the mite wash results as mites per 100 bees, not raw counts, since sample sizes vary.

Pricing via RevenueCat: free for 2 hives, then 5 USD/month or 40 USD lifetime.