Frequently asked questions

Yes. Community Edition includes 2 apiaries, 15 hives, 5 field jobs, inspections, treatments, harvests, hive health scores, forage/bloom calendar, basic analytics, community forum, QR/NFC hive scanning, offline mode, and data export (JSON/CSV) — with no ads.

Yes. All users can export hive data as JSON/CSV and hive count CSVs. Premium and above adds FSA-ready ELAP PDF/CSV, hive report PDFs, marketing kit PDFs, and batch verification pages. Your data stays yours.

Yes. Log hives, run inspections, and capture photos entirely offline. Everything queues locally and syncs automatically the moment you're back in range — so weak cell service in the field never costs you data.

Export formats align with CFIA and Canadian provincial requirements for registration and loss reporting. The app is available in English and French, and provincial apiary license documents can be uploaded directly to your profile.

Yes. HiveMasterPro supports two-factor authentication (TOTP) via any authenticator app, and all data is encrypted in transit and at rest. You own your data and can export it anytime.

Yes — every treatment starts a per-hive PHI countdown, visible on the hive and summarized in a dashboard banner across your full operation. It also scores treatment efficacy and flags resistance-risk rotation patterns.

Yes. Premium includes a conversational AI assistant with full per-hive context — inspections, treatments, queen status. Supports voice input, note parsing, on-demand hive summaries, and insurance policy analysis. The assistant runs on a secure platform-managed multi-provider AI cascade by default (Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, Roboflow, Groq, OpenAI Whisper, and xAI Grok as a text-reasoning resilience layer) with no setup required. For full control over model choice and usage limits, add your own OpenAI or xAI (Grok) key in Settings — your key takes precedence over the platform endpoint.

Bee AI is a hands-free voice assistant for the field, available on the Enterprise plan. It uses wake-word detection so you can run multi-step commands while your hands are full ("start an inspection on hive 12, log Varroa baseline 3, queen seen, save"). Two voice personas (Betty and Bobby) ship out of the box. Voice intents are audit-logged for traceability; transcripts are processed only for the active session and not stored as audio recordings. Bee AI is gated by tier and per-user opt-in.

Pre-Sales lets you take customer reservations for live bees (nucs, packages, queens, queen cells), honey (jarred, comb, creamed, infused), value-added retail (candles, soap, lip balm, body balm, honey sticks, beeswax wraps, mead), and B2B goods (wax foundation) — anything in your inventory hub. Create a "run" for a season, link it to a real inventory item, define one or more pickup waves with capacity, and either invite customers privately or share a public reservation link. The link works without a customer account and is bot-protected by Cloudflare Turnstile. Reservations move through ten lifecycle statuses (Pending review, Confirmed, Waitlisted, Pickup scheduled, Ready for pickup, Fulfilled, No-show, Cancelled by customer, Cancelled by producer, Refunded). When a wave fills, new reservations auto-route to a waitlist, and the next person is automatically promoted (with notification) when a slot frees. Customers can self-reschedule their pickup window or update contact info from a one-tap link without contacting you. A built-in Communication Center inbox aggregates every reply, bounce, complaint, and self-service action into one realtime triage queue with SLA aging badges. Pre-Sales is included on Premium and above.

No. Every Pre-Sales run links to a real inventory item, and capacity is enforced server-side. The moment a customer confirms a reservation the matching units soft-hold against your stock; mark fulfilled at pickup and the units consume; cancel or refund and the units release back to capacity. The math runs at the database level (FOR UPDATE row locks), so two concurrent submissions cannot both succeed if only one slot remains — one will route to the waitlist. Mid-season, when you publish a fresh harvest batch, graft round, or hive split into inventory, your open run picks up the new units automatically. The same soft-hold logic also covers Sales orders, so a draft order over your stock flags before you save.

No. HiveMasterPro provides the SMS rail for you on paying tiers — there is no separate Twilio account to set up, no second bill, and no carrier registration paperwork. Each paying tier comes with a monthly SMS segment allowance scaled to operation size; overage routes through your subscription. Customer pickup reminders, waitlist promotions, and reservation confirmations all go out over the included rail. (Community Edition does not include SMS.)

Yes. Public reservation links work for anonymous customers — no account, no app install — for any product type your run is set up for (live bees, honey, value-added retail, foundation, etc.). The form is bot-protected with Cloudflare Turnstile; rate limits and producer-controlled lockouts protect the public RPC. Customers can later self-reschedule or update contact info using one-tap links sent over SMS or email.

Yes. Open Pre-Sales → Integrations and connect your storefront with a REST API key (WooCommerce), an Admin custom-app token (Shopify), or an access token + location (Square Online). On the run’s Imports tab, hit "Pull from <platform>" once to backfill the last 60 days, then live webhooks push every new order into the right run automatically. Refunds and cancellations release capacity so the next waitlisted customer gets the slot. If you sell somewhere we don't natively support, the Zapier path lets you wire in any upstream system with a per-producer webhook URL + bearer token. Prefer not to connect at all? Drop a CSV file (or our downloadable template) on the Imports tab — every import runs as a dry-run preview first, so you see exactly what would happen before you commit.

Every imported order carries the upstream "order placed at" timestamp. When we run the import, we sort the rows by that timestamp ascending and drop them into your run's waves in arrival order. The customer who paid first gets first pick of the pickup windows; overflow rolls to the waitlist exactly the same way a public reservation would. Producers can still override individual assignments inside the app.

Two layers of safety. First, every delete shows a quick undo immediately after the action — one tap to restore. Second, deleted records sit in a 90-day Trash bin before being permanently purged. Restore from Trash brings the record back with full history (linked inspections, harvests, photos, notes) exactly as it was. Soft-deleted records are automatically hidden from analytics, regional intelligence, and team views, so there is no zombie data leaking into your reports. Every delete and restore is audit-logged with who, what, and when.

Public batch QR pages render only the fields you explicitly toggle on in your producer profile (your story, brand colors, lab attestation, etc.). Failing or pending lab results never appear on the public page (filtered at the SQL layer; only passing results render an "Independently lab tested" card). You can revoke any batch QR at any time — useful when a buyer disputes a batch or when a recall is in progress. The public RPC is rate-limited to protect against scraping. Optional Polygon blockchain verification anchors a tamper-proof cryptographic proof that consumers can independently verify on PolygonScan.

A 5-question, 8-field guided interview generates a producer profile that renders identically across every public batch QR scan and every device. Pick a brand-color swatch, upload a portrait, write a short story, and the profile is persisted server-side. Once enabled, scanned QR codes show your story, your hive count, your region, and whichever optional fields (lab attestation, claim evidence) you toggle on. Generate a 1080×1080 Instagram square share image with one tap, with three caption drafts (Short, Story, Facts) ready to copy-paste.

When you verify a honey batch, the app anchors a cryptographic proof to the Polygon blockchain via a secure backend — no wallet or crypto knowledge required. You purchase small verification credit packs in-app via Stripe (for example, 5 verifications for $2.99); each batch uses one credit. Once verified, a PolygonScan link appears on the batch's public QR page and in the marketing kit PDF, giving consumers tamper-proof, independently verifiable proof of origin.

Yes — the Commercial plan covers the full toolkit: load management with fleet registry and an interstate / inter-provincial movement checklist (state apiary inspection certificates, entry permits, lead-time reminders — see the transparent Exemptions & Best Practices guide on the Field & Fleet apps page for what’s legally required vs. best practice), pollination contracts with planning views, reusable templates, and auto-synced payments, 38 team roles with a granular permission matrix, staff onboarding flow, bulk add staff, crew workload dashboard, enterprise inventory with finished goods and recall management, batch inspections, and field job supply lists — all built for multi-yard and migratory operations.

Yes. You can create and join beekeeping events directly in the app — local club meetings, swarm catches, workshops, or any gathering — scoped to a group or open to all members. Events include location, start and end times, and a full description.

Yes — batch inspection (Commercial plan) lets you select a group of hives and walk through findings for each in one session, logging them all at once instead of opening separate inspection forms. Great for routine yard checks on large operations.

Yes. Each apiary gets real-time weather from Open-Meteo (the free, attribution-required forecast API HiveMasterPro uses by default) — temperature, wind speed, humidity, and an ideal-inspection verdict. Operations that supply their own OpenWeatherMap API key can switch to OpenWeatherMap as a fallback in Settings. Foraging status (Active, Marginal, or No foraging) helps plan your day, and a 3-day forecast with per-day inspection suitability flags lets you schedule ahead. There is also a bloom calendar showing expected nectar and pollen peaks by month for your region.

Yes. The permission matrix lets you set granular per-worker access levels — Edit, View, or None — across inspections, treatments, harvests, loads, inventory, and reporting. Combined with 38 industry-standard roles and role-specific dashboards, you control exactly what each person sees and does.

Yes. The inventory hub is built around 37 first-class kinds organized into 7 producer-facing groups (Live bees, Honey, Hive products, Value-added retail, Equipment & tools, Supplies, Other), so you get one consistent system whether you are tracking nucs, jarred honey, infused honey, candles, soap, mead, wax foundation, or your queen-rearing supplies. Premium includes basic inventory management. The Commercial plan unlocks the full suite: purchase orders, barcode scanning, lot tracking with expiry and recall alerts, finished goods from production through sale, auto-deduction from treatments and field activities, configurable approval workflows, maintenance work orders, multi-location management, and a hive setup BOM calculator. Pre-Sales reservations and Sales orders both draw from this same hub, with soft-hold semantics that prevent overselling.

37 first-class kinds across 7 producer-facing groups — built around how a beekeeping business actually runs. Live bees: packages, nucs, queens, queen cells, full colonies, swarms. Honey: jarred, bulk, comb, creamed, infused (each with their own variant attributes like jar size, flavor, lot). Hive products (raw): beeswax, pollen, propolis, royal jelly. Value-added retail: candles, soap, lip balm, body balm / salve / lotion, honey sticks, beeswax wraps, mead. Equipment & tools: hive equipment, tools, extraction equipment, diagnostic / testing gear, protective gear. Supplies: consumables, treatments, feed, hardware, packaging, queen-rearing supplies, hive ID / marking, making supplies (for the candles and soap you produce), wax foundation. Plus an Other catch-all. The taxonomy also drives the Pre-Sales run picker, the Sales CRM line items, the publish-from-production flows (harvest → jars, queen rearing → queens, hive split → nucs), and the recall and audit dashboards — all from the same source.

You publish from production. After a honey harvest, open the batch and tap Publish — pick the form (jarred, comb, creamed, infused), the jar size, and how many you bottled, and the units land in inventory in one step. Same flow for queen rearing: when graft cells reach the mated stage, tap Publish to create matching queen / queen-cell inventory items. Same for hive splits: convert eligible splits into nuc inventory. Every published lot keeps a trace link back to its source batch / graft / split, so when a recall fires the chain of custody is already there.

At the end of each season (or year), you get a summary aggregating colony outcomes — survived, lost (with cause), split, merged — along with production totals, treatment coverage and efficacy, and financial performance across your entire operation. Export as PDF or CSV for tax prep, planning, or sharing with your team.

Regional Intelligence is a dedicated dashboard that aggregates anonymized community health data (avg Varroa, mortality, trends), USDA/APHIS institutional metrics (colony counts, honey production, pest prevalence), and satellite-derived crop analysis for the region around each of your apiaries. Premium and above unlock the full dashboard with personalized alerts, community contribution opt-in, and predictive cards on every hive — colony risk scoring, treatment timing projections, winter survival estimates, and GDD-based nectar flow predictions.

Yes. The queen rearing module lets you create graft batches, track each queen cell through six stages (grafted, accepted, capped, emerged, mated, introduced), distribute cells to hives, and review analytics like acceptance and mating success rates. It also includes a grafting calendar, season planner, QR labels for queens, and treatment-queen safety checks that warn before treating hives with young queens. Community Edition does not include queen rearing. Premium allows up to 3 active graft batches, and Commercial and Enterprise have no batch limit.

Open the Enterprise plan and tap "Request Enterprise Plan." A guided 3-step form collects your contact info, operation size (apiaries, hives, team, contracts), and specific needs. After submitting, you’ll receive a response within 1–2 business days. Once a custom plan is prepared, it appears on your Plans & Pricing screen where you can accept and pay via Stripe or decline.

Yes. The Commercial plan includes fleet fuel logging (per-vehicle gallons, cost, odometer, fuel type, and cost-per-gallon) and vehicle maintenance scheduling with 10 service types — oil change, tire rotation, DOT inspection, brake service, and more. Each maintenance record tracks cost, odometer, and next-due mileage or date so nothing slips through the cracks during migratory season.

After signing up, you’ll receive an email within 72 hours with account setup instructions. For general questions or support, use the contact form and expect a reply within 1–2 business days. Once logged in, a guided onboarding walk-through helps you add your first apiary, create hives, and run your first inspection. The Community Edition is fully free — no credit card required.

Yes. HiveMasterPro Field Tech and HiveMasterPro Fleet are separate native iOS and Android apps from the main HiveMasterPro app. They’re included for free with your Commercial subscription — any team member you assign a field-worker role can install Field Tech, and any team member you assign a driver role can install Fleet. They sign in with the same credentials and sync against the same operation in real time.

Yes. The Fleet app captures pre-trip and post-trip DVIRs aligned with FMCSR §§ 396.11 / 396.13 — 17 standard checkpoints, defect reporting with photo and note, driver e-signature, and 14-month retention exceeding the FMCSA § 396.11(c)(2) minimum. A defect automatically flags the truck out-of-service and routes a maintenance task. Like all regulated outputs in HiveMasterPro, DVIRs are user-validated before submission and not a substitute for licensed compliance certification.

Often, partially. A lot of commercial and migratory beekeeping operations qualify for one or more federal exemptions: the 150 air-mile agricultural-commodity Hours-of-Service exemption (49 CFR 395.1(k)), the ELD agricultural exception (49 CFR 395.8(a)(1)(iii)), the Covered Farm Vehicle exemption (49 CFR 390.39), and state-discretion CDL agricultural farm waivers (49 CFR 383.3(d)). USDA APHIS does not regulate interstate honey-bee movement between the lower 48 (7 CFR Part 322), although Hawaii is closed and Canada-to-Alaska transit of US bees is prohibited. State apiary inspection certificates and entry permits are common and vary widely. Whether any specific exemption applies depends on GVWR, for-hire vs. private status, route, and the season. The Field & Fleet apps page has a full Exemptions & Best Practices section for the US (FMCSA / USDA APHIS / state apiary) and Canada (Transport Canada / CFIA / provincial), citing the voluntary BMPs from the Honey Bee Health Coalition, Apiary Inspectors of America, CAPA, the Almond Board of California, and Project Apis m. This is informational only and not legal advice — verify with FMCSA, USDA APHIS, your state apiary inspector, Transport Canada, CFIA, your provincial apiculture office, and qualified counsel before relying on any exemption. Even when an exemption applies, insurance claims, ELAP, pollination contracts, and traceability all benefit from the same evidence trail — which is why the tracking exists in HiveMasterPro either way.

Transport Canada NSC Standard 9 exempts two- and three-axle commercial vehicles transporting primary products of a farm from federal Hours-of-Service when the driver / motor carrier is the producer. Each province operates its own apiary act (AB Bee Act, BC Animal Health Act / Bee Regulation, ON Bees Act, SK Apiaries Act 2005, MB Bee Act, QC Animal Health Protection Act, and so on) and most require provincial registration plus a movement permit / inspection report for inter-provincial transport. The CFIA prohibition on US honey-bee packages (SOR/2004-136) remains in force as of August 2025, while individually hand-picked US queens are permitted. CAPA publishes the national BMPs that HiveMasterPro’s tracking fields line up with. See the full Canada section in the Exemptions & Best Practices guide on the Field & Fleet apps page.

Every line item on a sales order draws from the same finished-goods inventory and lot tracking your operations team uses — across all 37 kinds (live bees, honey forms, hive products, value-added retail, equipment, supplies, foundation). Draft orders soft-hold their units the same way Pre-Sales reservations do, so a customer cannot end up at the door for stock you already promised someone else. When you mark an order fulfilled, the lot decrements automatically; when a lot is recalled, every order containing it surfaces in the recall dashboard. There is no double entry and no stale stock counts.

Compliance Automation is a four-tab dashboard that turns audit prep into a passive byproduct of normal data entry. The first tab tracks FSMA Section 204 readiness (Traceability Lot Code, Critical Tracking Events, 24-hour FDA recall trace export). The second tracks USDA / CFIA movement permits with expiry warnings. The third audits treatments and PHI windows. The fourth confirms Polygon batch-anchor status. Compliance Automation does not provide legal certification — outputs are user-validated before submission.

The forecast view stitches together your sales pipeline, scheduled pollination contracts, planned harvests, recurring costs, and equipment depreciation into a 12-week and 12-month projection. Every revenue and expense line auto-maps to a Schedule F (Form 1040) category, so when January arrives your accountant gets clean books. Tax-mapped exports are user-validated and not a substitute for licensed tax advice.

A multi-provider stack picks the right model for each job: Anthropic Claude for vision and reasoning (frame photos, AI assistant, Morning Briefing), Google Gemini for verification passes, Roboflow for specialist computer vision (varroa, queen cells), Groq for low-latency voice structuring, OpenAI Whisper for voice transcription, and platform-managed xAI Grok (grok-4.3 family) as a text-reasoning resilience layer in the AI cascade (text only — never vision or audio). You can also bring your own OpenAI or xAI (Grok) API key under Settings → AI Providers, which takes precedence over the platform-managed endpoint. Full subprocessor list is in the Privacy Policy.

All 3,143 US counties across all 50 states. Coverage is powered by USDA NASS CropScape (CDL) land-use data, NASA LANCE satellite NDVI (refreshed daily), iNaturalist observation density, and Open-Meteo weather. Every figure on every forage card is sourced and tappable for provenance — not a black box.

The sustainability dashboard tracks your environmental stewardship across five pillars: colony health, chemical stewardship, habitat quality, carbon efficiency, and resource self-sufficiency. Scores update automatically from your inspections, treatments, and attestations — no extra data entry. You can earn 10 badges (IPM Master, Organic Champion, Zero Loss Season, and more), track your organic transition countdown (USDA NOP 36-month requirement), explore certification pathways for USDA Organic, Bee Better Certified, and Canadian provincial programs, and opt in to display earned badges on your public producer profile for buyer-facing proof. Available on Premium and above.

NFC writing is a permission-gated action restricted to owners and admins by default. With permission, a user can encode a hive’s identifier onto a blank NTAG21x sticker straight from the phone. There is also a web NFC reader on Chrome / Android, so a desktop-class user can read or assign tags from the web app without the mobile build. Every scan creates a chronological log entry with user, GPS, and timestamp for full audit history.