🗒️ Beekeeping Record-Keeping: Spreadsheet, App or Paper

About this simulation

Every hive inspection produces data — queen status, brood pattern, stores, temperament, treatments applied. How that data gets captured shapes how useful it is later. This dashboard models three common logging methods used by UK beekeepers side by side: a paper record card kept in the hive roof, a desktop spreadsheet filled in after the apiary visit, and a mobile app used in the field.

How it works

• Each method has a per-hive logging time and a separate time cost to later find one historical record.
• Paper is fast to scribble in the field but slow to search — you must flip through cards.
• A spreadsheet is tidy and searchable, but usually filled in from memory later, adding transcription overhead and risk of drift.
• An app is fastest to search (indexed, filterable) and fast to log in-field — unless a poor mobile signal forces manual re-entry or delays sync.
• The three bars rise to the value of whichever metric you're comparing; the amber pulse travels to whichever method currently wins.

Controls

• Hives in apiary — how many colonies are inspected each visit (1–40).
• Inspections / month — how often you visit the apiary (1–8 times).
• Compare metric — switch the bars between total logging time and single-record retrieval time.
• Poor field signal — simulates spotty apiary connectivity, which slows the app's in-field logging.
• ↺ Replay data run — restarts the flight of records from the hives to the winning station. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom.

Did you know?

UK beekeeping associations increasingly recommend digital record apps because inspection history — queen introductions, disease treatments, swarm dates — is legally relevant for disease-control reporting (e.g. to the National Bee Unit) and much faster to produce on request than a shoebox of paper cards.