Authoritative project documentation
ApiaryLens Marketing Overview
- Status: Pre-release messaging draft
- Last reviewed: 2026-07-15
Working tagline: Know every hive. Empower every beekeeper.
ApiaryLens is a planned apiary intelligence and hive-management application for people who keep bees and want an easier way to remember what is happening in every hive.
It is being designed to help answer practical questions:
- Which hive needs to be checked next?
- When did we last see the queen?
- Did the mite count go up or down?
- Which hive was fed or treated?
- What photos did we take during the last inspection?
- When did we harvest honey?
- What may be blooming nearby?
- Should we ask a mentor to review this frame or inspection?
ApiaryLens is currently in discovery, research, and design. There is no released application yet. This overview describes the intended product experience, not features available for download today.
What ApiaryLens Is Planned to Help You Do
- Keep hive notes and history together.
- Track apiaries, hives, queens, inspections, equipment, feeding, treatments, media, weather, blooms, and harvests as those capabilities are delivered.
- Build a visual history of each hive with photos and videos.
- Work from a phone or tablet in the bee yard without dependable internet access, then synchronize later when using a connected deployment.
- Share selected records with family members, mentors, or bee clubs without exposing unrelated private information.
- Export and retain control of hive data and media.
- Grow from one hive toward family, club, research, or commercial use without moving to an incompatible product.
Built for Real Beekeeping
The first target is a family or hobbyist beekeeper using phones, tablets, and computers. ApiaryLens begins with an offline-first Progressive Web App so field records remain usable when service is poor or absent.
The product is intended to support three approachable operating profiles:
- Personal: device-only use with no required server or account
- Family: synchronized records across trusted family devices
- Organization: later club, commercial, education, extension, and research use
The same portable core should support all three. A self-hoster should not be forced into a paid cloud, AI provider, or proprietary data format.
Planned Capability Areas
- Apiaries, hive locations, and hive history
- Boxes, frames, and other hive equipment
- Queens and queen history
- Inspections, notes, reminders, and follow-up work
- Photos and videos
- Varroa counts, health observations, and treatments
- Feeding and consumption notes
- Weather and regional bloom context
- Honey and wax harvests
- Sharing, reports, exports, and trends
These capabilities will arrive in phases; they are not all launch requirements. See the Product Capability Overview for the full product narrative and the Roadmap for current sequencing.
Open-Source and Self-Hosted Direction
ApiaryLens is being designed as an open-source, self-hosted-first product with an offline-capable PWA and portable data. The public product uses the OSI-approved Apache License 2.0. Pre-release marketing must still distinguish released capabilities from planned capabilities.
The intended outcome is:
- No required paid cloud account for the core self-hosted product
- No required AI subscription
- No telemetry or data egress by default
- Local and Docker Compose deployment paths
- Guided installation, update, backup, restore, and diagnostics
- A measured free or predictably near-free family-cloud reference where practical
- A future optional hosted service without making self-hosting second-class
Future Direction
Later phases may include AI-assisted photo observations, inspection summaries, native iPhone and Android clients, hive scales and sensors, Home Assistant, bee-club workflows, research tools, and commercial-apiary capabilities.
AI will provide optional observations rather than final diagnoses. Native clients will connect to a beekeeper's chosen compatible deployment. Community galleries or registries may be considered when justified, but no plugin marketplace is committed.
Data Promise
Working message: Your bees. Your data. Your future.
ApiaryLens should help people care for bees, remember what happened, learn over time, and keep control of the records they create.
Visual Overview
The current marketing visual deliberately shows real family-scale beekeeping rather than a fictional finished application interface.
The structured capability map and current roadmap are maintained as Lucidchart diagrams and may be reused when detailed visual context is needed.
Shareable Handout
The following 4:5 pre-release handout is designed for social posts, messaging, and
email. It uses exact project language and links people to the public GitHub source
while apiarylens.org is being prepared.
