Apinae counts every bee in and out of the hive, records the conditions around it, then compares the result against neighbouring colonies, local weather and published pollination science. What reaches you is an alert and a recommendation, not another chart to interpret.
See how it worksFourteen years of low-power engineering · 3.8-year battery · Indoor and outdoor
Irrigation is metered to the litre and climate is held to a fraction of a degree. Then a bumblebee hive arrives in a cardboard box, gets placed wherever there is room, and is replaced on a fixed calendar because nothing measures whether it still works. Roughly a third of the world's food crops need an animal pollinator, and it is the one input nobody instruments. Was the colony alive when it arrived? Is it standing in the right place? Does it still have three good weeks in it? Today those answers come from lifting the lid and forming an impression.
of food crops depend on animal pollination
weeks of a bumblebee queen's lifecycle reach the grower, and nothing measures what happens inside them
of a greenhouse crop's value is spent on the pollinators that set it, and none of it is measured
Bumblebees and honeybees, indoors and outdoors, reporting into one platform.
Every flight in and out, counted.
A non-intrusive optical counter that sits at the hive entrance and registers every bumblebee passing through it, in either direction. It separates workers from drones, which is what lets you follow the colony's development and judge how much working life is left in it. Outside temperature and humidity are logged alongside the counts. It fits the hive formats used by the major commercial breeders.
See colony strength without opening the hive.
An optical counter for Langstroth and traditional hive entrances that tracks foraging traffic and outside conditions. In-hive sensors add brood temperature and acoustics, the two signals that give away queen status and colony mood well before anything is visible from outside.
One collector per site, indoor or outdoor.
The gateway picks up data from every counter within BLE Long Range, keeps 218 days of records in local flash in case the network drops out, and uploads over Ethernet or cellular.
Indoor
USB-C powered, Ethernet and WiFi, for greenhouse deployment
Outdoor
Solar and LiPo, cellular (Cat-M1/NB-IoT/2G), for open-field sites
Both variants run the same firmware core and the same data protocol, so a mixed indoor and outdoor estate reports into one place.
The case is mostly arithmetic, and it is the grower's arithmetic, not ours.
Know the hive arrived alive
A colony that cooked in transit or shipped weak still looks fine through the plastic window. The counter shows you its first day of traffic, so a dead-on-arrival hive becomes a supplier claim within 24 hours instead of a mystery you uncover at harvest, by which time the claim window has closed and the zone it was meant to pollinate has already under-set.
Run each colony to its own end, not the average one's
Producers recommend eight weeks because that is what is left of a sixteen-week queen lifecycle once breeding, shipping and settling have taken their share. Eight weeks is an average across colonies, not a fixed limit, and individual colonies are often still working at nine weeks and sometimes longer. Nobody measures which ones do. A hectare of greenhouse tomato buys 23 colonies a year, so one extra week of measured life is real money.
Put the hive where it actually performs
Traffic varies more than growers expect between positions under the same roof: beside a vent, near a door, at the end of a row, under a shaded gutter. Counting per hive and per position turns placement from folklore into something you can test once and repeat every season.
Hold your supplier to a number
Compare batches and breeders on measured flight activity rather than on the invoice. After one season you know whose colonies work hardest in your conditions, and you have the record to bring to the next contract.
Catch the failure while it is still fixable
Queen loss, swarming, robbing and a blocked entrance all leave a signature in flight traffic, brood temperature and hive sound days before a beekeeper would notice it on inspection. Finding it early is the difference between requeening a colony and losing it.
Cut the drive time
Inspections cost fuel, hours and colony disturbance. Once you can see which hives are behaving normally, you visit the ones that are not. For an apiary spread over several sites this is usually the largest saving on the list.
Prove the pollination you delivered
Beekeepers renting colonies for pollination are paid on trust. Per-hive flight records covering the contracted window give the grower evidence of what turned up and give the beekeeper a reason to charge properly for strong colonies.
Research-grade records, automatically
High-resolution flight data with matching environmental readings supports breeding evaluation, pesticide-effect studies and pollination efficacy work, without a student standing at the entrance with a clicker.
From the hive entrance to a recommendation you can act on the same morning.
Counter
registers every bee that passes
Gateway
scans counters over BLE
Gateway
buffers 218 days locally
Cloud
syncs every five minutes
Analysis
flags what changed and what to do
The analysis layer
Earlier generations of hive monitoring stopped at the chart. Apinae carries on from there.
Every colony is held against its own recent history, against the other hives sharing its site and its week, against the weather at the site's coordinates, and against a body of published work on pollinator behaviour. When something moves outside its expected range you hear about it in a sentence, with the readings behind it attached.
Two hives twenty metres apart under the same glass, from the same batch, in the same week ought to behave the same way. When one falls behind, that gap is information. The system finds the outlier and then looks at what is different about where it stands: distance to the vents, orientation, shade, traffic through the nearest door.
A drop in flights means nothing on its own. Set it beside inside and outside temperature, humidity, vapour pressure deficit and the forecast for that exact location, and it resolves into two very different situations: a colony in trouble, or a colony sensibly staying home because it is 44 degrees outside.
A fixed threshold either cries wolf all season or misses the event entirely. Queen loss, swarming, robbing, a blocked gate and a hive that never woke up after delivery each have a shape in the counts and the acoustics. Those shapes are what the system watches for.
The output is something a grower can do that morning. Move hive 12 two rows away from the vent. Keep batch B another ten days, it is still running at four fifths of its week-three traffic. Open the gates an hour earlier tomorrow, the forecast hits 44°C before eleven.
Every recommendation carries the readings it was drawn from, so an agronomist can check the reasoning before anyone acts on it.
In development. Rolling out with our first pilot sites.Six decisions worth understanding before you commit a season's crop to anyone's hardware.
The counter runs on one CR2032 and averages 6.24 µA. Nothing to charge, no solar panel on the hive, no maintenance visit that exists only to change a battery.
Components rated -40°C to +85°C, an IP65 outdoor gateway and solar power for sites with no mains. Specified for Gulf summers first, which makes everywhere else straightforward.
BLE 5.3 Coded PHY (S=8) reaches past 200 m in the open, so counters find the gateway from across a greenhouse or a field without cable trays or WiFi over the crop.
The gateway holds over 262,000 records in flash and manages the buffer as a ring. A cellular outage costs you latency and nothing else.
Optical gates give an unambiguous count at microamps of power. Camera systems need mains, cleaning, and a model retrained for every new hive, lens and lighting condition.
Schematics, power budgets and data formats are published. If this is going on your crop for a season, you should be able to check the claims rather than take them on faith.
The UAE brings in roughly 80 to 90% of its food. National food security policy is putting serious money into controlled-environment agriculture: greenhouses, vertical farms, protected cultivation. Almost all of it depends on pollinators that arrive in a box and have to survive the summer.
The Gulf climate is hard on bees. Air above 45°C, humidity that swings from oppressive to absent, and very little supporting native forage keep colonies under continuous stress. That also makes it the right place to build this. A system that keeps colonies productive here will not struggle in Almería or the Westland.
We are looking for pilot sites
Greenhouse operators, protected agriculture projects and open-field apiaries in the UAE. If you manage pollinators and want to see what the data looks like on your own crop, get in touch.
Get in TouchThe 6.24 µA daily average in the bumblebee counter did not come off a datasheet. It came from 25 nA regulators, nanoamp comparators and a long run of revisions in which every microamp had to justify itself. That number is the reason the device lasts years on a coin cell instead of months, and the reason nobody has to think about it again once it is on the hive.
The same discipline governs the analysis layer. Nothing is reported to a grower unless the reasoning behind it can be shown.
Apinae is the bee subfamily that covers both bumblebees and honeybees, the two we monitor. It also splits neatly: apin.ae, the UAE, our home and our first deployment.
Greenhouse, apiary or research station, we would like to hear what you are trying to find out.
buzz@apin.ae