In this extended abstract, the authors report the ongoing work on a new mobile app for beekeepers. It is very important for beekeepers - especially for those who are in search of new locations for their beehives - to know the current situation in the immediate vicinity. This work presents a mobile application suitable for beekeepers to view weather and air quality data and, in particular, what people in the nearby area have annotated.
process is simplified for all users with features such as identifying plant species via photos and showing which plants are suitable for bees.
The development of a new app is part of the HIVEOPOLIS project [
The goals of developing the app consists of three main components: 1. An interactive augmented map shows key elements of weather and air quality for beekeepers. 2. Users must be able to make inputs and help beekeepers with it. 3. It should be simple and swiftly to use.
The application was developed as a native iOS app in the programming language Swift with
the integrated development environment Xcode. One reason mobile app development was
preferred is access to the camera for various functions, such as photographing plants for plant
identification. Furthermore, GPS data is required in case a user of the app wants to get directions
to the next destination of his hives. Apple’s MapKit was used natively for the app’s interactive
map. This allows users to see the map as a satellite view in 2D or 3D. OpenWeather provides
with its API the current and forecast weather as well as air pollution data for all coordinates.
The air pollution values are currently based on the European Air Quality Index. A pretrained
convolutional neural network was used for the flower recognition function: Oxford’s 102 Flower
Dataset with 102 categories, each 40 - 200 images, allows to take a picture of any flower and
it tries to recognise the flower’s name [
A preliminary user evaluation had been created as an online survey. A total of 26 people participated in it, 15 were beekeepers and 11 were non-beekeepers. They assisted in revising the design and generated ideas for new functionalities. After this evaluation an alpha test was made. Sergey Petrov from the company Pollenity asked 22 Bulgarian beekeepers to test the app on an iPhone and give feedback. Each member of the group spent between 1 and 10 minutes testing the app. The methodology of the test included a short verbal presentation and a video tutorial on how to use the app. In the following pictures, you can see the app. Figure 1 depicts an impression of the app. (Left) shows markers on the map that have theoretically been set by users. Potential beekeeping locations are depicted here, along with plants of interest to bees. For example, a beekeeper can see where other beekeepers are in the vicinity, if they have marked a chosen location as already been occupied by the beekeeper, and where beekeepers should pay attention to the protection of wild bees. (Right) shows the current weather with temperature, humidity, air speed, UV index, as well as the current air quality values.
The preliminary user evaluation and the alpha test confirmed that such an app could be of interest to beekeepers and environmentalists. The next steps would be to define some corrections to the design and then test it again as a beta version to get further constructive feedback. Further evaluation is needed to collect more meaningful reactions and constructive criticism from beekeepers to be able to improve the app. Current ideas for improvements are: The most important point is the implementation of Android. Another important point is localization, so that the app works all over the world without language barriers. The authors are also considering how gamification can be integrated to motivate users and bind them to the app. Furthermore, there are still a lot of functions that could be implemented. For example, the lfowering times of the respective plants, so that beekeepers know when the flowers are usable for them. And uploadable images so that users can see more of what the location looks like. After some testing and improvements, the app could be made available to the public.
This work was supported by the EU H2020 program under grant agreement No. 824069 (HIVEOPOLIS).