← Work OSBeehives
Winter is when colonies fail quietly, and it is the one season you cannot open a hive to check. Monitoring without opening the box is the whole argument for the product, so we built the winter campaign around it.
2017 – 2022
OSBeehives
A sensor, an app, and a machine-learning model that tells a beekeeper what is happening inside a hive without opening it.
Backing
EU-Funded Research Programme (opens in a new tab)
OSBeehives-Poland sp. z o.o. ran “OS Beehives: R&D works on a system for monitoring hives and bee health and condition”, co-financed by European Funds under the Intelligent Development Operational Programme 2014–2020, sub-measure 1.3.1 (BRIdge Alfa). A 763,000 zł project with 610,400 zł of funding, completed June 2021.
Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship (opens in a new tab)
Funded fellowship for open technology in the public interest.
Boomtown & Brinc
Hardware accelerators, Boulder and Hong Kong.
Kickstarter & Indiegogo (opens in a new tab)
The launch campaigns that started the project, 2013–2015.
The Situation
Honey bees pollinate around $15B of US crops a year, and beekeepers lose roughly 40% of their colonies annually against an acceptable rate of 15–20%. Most problems are found during a manual inspection, by which point the colony is often gone.
No passive, always-on monitoring existed at a price a hobbyist or mid-scale beekeeper would pay. Lab testing was slow and expensive.
The Assumption
Beekeepers need more data about their hives.
What Was Actually True
Beekeepers need to know when to act and what to do. Data without context creates anxiety, not confidence. The funded research scope that followed said the same thing: classification, recommendations, and a knowledge base, not raw readings.
Decision 01
Show What to Do, Not Just What Is Happening
Out-of-range indicators on the charts, a glanceable health score, and a built-in knowledge base, so a reading came with the response attached.
Decision 02
Alerts Are the Product
A preset alert library plus fully custom rules on any metric, threshold and frequency, and accelerometer alerts for disturbance, animal invasion and theft. The dashboard is where you go afterward.
Decision 03
The Hardware Has to Live Inside the Hive
We rebuilt the device slimmer, internal, solar-powered and thin enough to slide between frames, and rewrote onboarding around it. Setup was the single biggest reason early units ended up in a drawer.
Months on the Road
I lived out of a vehicle visiting beekeepers across the country, camped on site, worked as a beekeeper's assistant to see commercial and artisanal operations from the inside, ran about twelve in-depth interviews, took beekeeping workshops, and kept bees myself. Then we shipped a free app so beekeepers in dozens of countries labelled the training data: thousands of recordings, and eventually millions.
What Shipped
2,000
IoT sensors deployed
units shipped
10,000
Users across 40 countries by 2022
product analytics, 2022 snapshot
$500K
Revenue generated
company records
What I’d Do Differently
We shipped charts and metrics to people who think in colonies, seasons, and jobs to be done. The reframe, when to act and what to do, arrived halfway through, and the product never fully caught up to it. Hive Story is that lesson built as the foundation: the research and the data translated into the language a beekeeper actually thinks in, with the receipts and the recommendation attached, instead of a dashboard waiting to be interpreted.