Hive Sentinel

What it does

Hive Sentinel is a desktop companion for beekeepers that helps you record detailed hive inspections and automatically detect varroa mites in photographs of your bees using on-device AI.

• Manage multiple apiaries and hives in one place
• Log full inspections — weather, queen status, brood observation, stores, temperament, actions taken and notes
• Drop in a photo of a bee or frame and let the AI highlight any varroa mites it finds
• Browse your full inspection history, with images and outcomes
• Export inspections to CSV for record-keeping or analysis

How to use it

• 1. Create an apiary — Click New Apiary, give it a name and location.
• 2. Add a hive — Inside an apiary, click New Hive. Each hive gets a number and an optional name. You can rename or renumber later with the pencil icon.
• 3. Start an inspection — Open a hive and click New Inspection. Fill in what you observed. Use Use current weather to auto-fetch local conditions, or type your own.
• 4. Mark your Queen — Follow International marking guidelines and record the colour of your Queen marking. Queen not seen? Record it for future reference.
• 5. Run varroa detection — In the inspection form, attach a clear photo of your bees and click Detect varroa. The AI will draw red boxes around any mites it finds.
• 6. Save and review — Save the inspection. It's added to the hive's history and can be exported at any time.

About the AI YOLOv8

The varroa detection model is a custom-trained YOLOv8 object detector built specifically for the Hive Sentinel app.

• Training data: Over 18,000 labelled images of bees, with every visible varroa mite hand-annotated.
• Architecture: YOLOv8s — small enough to run quickly on laptops, large enough for high accuracy.
• Validated recall: Roughly 85% of visible mites are correctly detected in test images.
• Format: Exported to ONNX for efficient inference using ONNX Runtime.
• Confidence threshold: Each detection shows a confidence score and an image size of 640×640.

Tips for best results: photograph bees in good daylight, get reasonably close, keep the camera steady, and capture a clear focused shot. The model works on photos of bees on combs, landing boards, or alcohol-wash samples.

Privacy and offline use

Everything in Hive Sentinel runs locally on your computer. There is no cloud, no account, no analytics, and no data ever leaves your device — including all photos and inspection records.

• AI detection runs entirely on your machine
• Inspection records and images are stored in your local app folder
• The only network calls are optional: fetching live weather (when you click the button) and quietly checking for app updates on launch

Updates

Hive Sentinel checks for new versions automatically whenever you launch it. If an update is available, it downloads in the background and asks you when you'd like to restart. Your inspection history and apiary data are preserved across updates.

Acknowledgements

Built by APBees with Electron, FastAPI, Ultralytics YOLOv8, and ONNX Runtime. Weather data provided by Open-Meteo.