A blank page is the wrong thing to hand somebody standing over an open hive with gloves on. The field form asks what to look at, and asks only as much as you want it to.
Get the AppRecording everything on every visit is how people stop recording at all. So there are four depths, and you can change between them whenever you like without losing anything you have already written down.
The essentials, mostly from outside the hive. A fast pass on a colony that looks fine.
Routine management. Queen, brood, stores, space, temperament.
The diagnostic questions. Brood pattern, cappings, signs on the bees, what is at the entrance.
The lot. For the colony you are watching closely, or the one you are keeping records on for a reason.
Never open a hive for a fishing expedition. Have a reason, then lift the lid. That line is Randy Oliver's, and it stuck. It is the reason this app is built around goals at all, rather than opening on a blank form and hoping.
So the form follows it. You pick what you came to do, and it asks the questions that go with it. A mite check asks about the wash. A swarm check asks about cells and space. A routine visit asks what a routine visit asks.
That is also why it works with gloves on. Fewer questions, bigger targets, voice dictation when your hands are full, and a QR or NFC sticker on the hive so the right record opens without you hunting for it.
This is the part that matters a season later, and it is the part most records get wrong.
There are three different answers to "were there hive beetles", and a good record keeps them apart. You never looked. You looked and saw none. You looked and found some. Most notebooks and most apps collapse the first two into a blank, and a blank quietly becomes a zero the moment anything tries to chart it.
So the form stores checked, none seen as its own answer, distinct from never having been asked. It sounds like a small thing. It is the difference between a chart that shows a problem resolving itself and a chart that shows nobody looked for six weeks.
The same rule runs through the rest of it. Nothing checked, nothing saved. Your history shows what you actually observed, and where the gaps are, it says so.
It will not diagnose your colony. It records what you saw and it does not tell you what that means, because a tool that starts naming diseases off an ambiguous photograph will eventually be confidently wrong at the worst possible moment, and after that you stop trusting all of it.
Where the form can help you record accurately, it does. There are reference photographs throughout: what eggs look like on a dark frame, what a charged cup looks like next to a capped cell, what deformed wings and K-wing actually look like on a bee. Each one says what is in the picture and stops there.
This form is a long way from the first one I built, and the reason is that studying for the California Master Beekeeper Program showed me how much I had been walking past. Not through carelessness. You cannot notice a thing you do not know exists. Knowing comes first, and attention comes second, in that order and not the other way round.
So it grows as I learn. When I understand something properly, or run into it in one of my own hives, I add the question, and I add a photograph of what it actually looks like to the help beside it.
And you can ignore any of it. Skip a question and the app does not mind, does not chase you about it, and does not treat the blank as a failing. It records that nobody looked, and moves on. Then one day you learn what a thing is, and you start seeing it, and you start logging it, and your records get deeper because you went and got the knowledge rather than because something nagged you into ticking a box. I think that order makes for a better beekeeper, and it is the only order that has ever worked on me.
Everything in there is something I know for a fact. No conjecture, no inference, no conflation. What you see is what it is and nothing more. Where I have not seen a thing myself, there is no picture of it, and I would rather leave the gap than fill it with something off the internet.
Which is the open invitation. Some of the more abstract things I have no photograph for yet. If you have images with provenance, and the records that go with them, I would be glad to put them in the help section and credit you for them. hello@colonytrack.app.
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