The Open Apiary Project deploys free ApisNode beehive monitors to beekeepers worldwide — putting real, continuous data behind every keeper's decisions while building the world's most comprehensive apiary health database to combat Colony Collapse Disorder.
Beekeepers in the United States lose an average of 40–50% of their managed colonies every year. Without intervention, the pollinators responsible for one-third of our food supply face an existential threat.
By deploying free ApisNode beehive monitors to regional beekeepers, we are building the world's most comprehensive, anonymized apiary health database — empowering researchers and the agricultural sector to forecast swarming, detect Varroa blooms, and track climate-driven stressors in real-time. And for the keeper, one principle holds throughout: we don't tell you how to keep bees — we give you real evidence from your own hives, so you can make better-informed decisions.
Advanced LoRa-enabled ApisNode sensor kits distributed to beekeepers at no cost. Each kit monitors temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, 10-band acoustics, 6-band vibration, a 10-band gas (VOC) fingerprint, and hive tilt — 30+ metrics per cycle.
Daily AI health reports fuse sensor telemetry with peer-reviewed bee science research and voice-transcribed field inspections. Beekeepers get colony health scores, early issue detection, and the evidence behind every observation — data to inform the decisions only a beekeeper can make.
All data is anonymized before aggregation — GPS coarsened to USDA hardiness zones, user IDs hashed, timestamps smoothed. The resulting database enables regional disease outbreak detection, climate correlation studies, and network-wide pollination forecasting.
Founder Dan Seitz joins hosts Jeff Ott and Becky Masterman to discuss how thousands of instrumented colonies — and the Open Apiary Project's anonymized open database — could reveal patterns in honey bee behavior that individual inspections can't see. Listen to the episode →
Our end-to-end system transforms raw environmental data into actionable intelligence — automatically, continuously, and non-invasively.
Battery-powered sensor nodes install inside hives in seconds. An always-on gateway bridges the apiary to the cloud. Zero configuration required — devices auto-pair via proximity.
Every few minutes, each node captures temperature, humidity, pressure, acoustic spectra, vibration spectra, a 10-step gas heater-scan fingerprint, and orientation — transmitting encrypted data over sub-GHz LoRa radio.
Cloud-based AI fuses 24-hour telemetry with bee science research and field inspection notes to produce daily health scores, issue detection, and recommended actions for each colony.
Anonymized data feeds regional and network-wide health indices — enabling early detection of disease outbreaks, climate impact tracking, and pollination capacity forecasting across hardiness zones.
The aggregated, anonymized database already supports researchers, regulators, and the agricultural sector: network statistics are published daily, and anonymized row-level telemetry bundles are available to named researchers under a Data Use Agreement.
ApisNode sensor deployed between frames in a production New Mexico apiary
Every field-installed sensor in the network feeds these figures — pooled with no geography attached, recomputed and republished every morning at 07:00 UTC.
Every marker is a data collection region — shown by USDA hardiness zone, never by exact location. Explore the live network and read each region's daily analysis.
This isn't a someday database — it's already running. Every enrolled colony receives a daily AI health report that fuses 24 hours of sensor telemetry with peer-reviewed bee science. The openly-published reports below come from our founding demo apiary in Los Alamos, New Mexico — members' own reports stay private unless they choose to share them.
of daily reports — published openly and growing every single day, across every region in the network.
Browse the report archive →We've successfully engineered a V1 prototype deployed across production apiaries. Now we're transitioning to a scalable, grant-funded international deployment.
Custom PCB design, embedded firmware, cloud infrastructure, AI analytics pipeline, mobile app, and web dashboards — all built and deployed in production apiaries with over-the-air updates.
Months of continuous field operation validating sensor accuracy, battery life, LoRa range, deep-sleep reliability, and AI analysis quality with real colonies across multiple seasons.
Filing for 501(c)(3) status to enable tax-deductible donations, grant eligibility, and institutional partnerships with universities and agricultural agencies.
Applying for USDA SBIR/STTR, NSF, EPA, and private foundation grants to fund manufacturing, distribution, and regional beekeeper onboarding across all 50 US states — while the trial program itself is open to beekeepers worldwide.
Design for Manufacturing (DFM) optimization, injection-molded enclosures, pick-and-place PCB assembly, and streamlined provisioning for thousand-unit production runs.
Whether you're a beekeeper, researcher, engineer, or conservationist — there's a role for you in the Open Apiary Project.
Receive free sensor kits, contribute anonymized data to the open network database — and download your own hives' full history as CSV any time. Apply for a free kit →
Anonymized, row-level telemetry bundles are available under a Data Use Agreement. Email hive_master@apisnode.com with your affiliation, research question, time window, and variables needed.
Fund the manufacturing and deployment of sensor networks across the growing network
Agricultural agencies, universities, and conservation organizations