Hey Maya is a smartphone app that acts as a notebook for beekeepers. It allows you to record information from hive inspections in your apiary, information about harvests, sales, and purchases, as well as any notes that can be used as tasks to perform.

The app is free to download and use. It is fully functional, with no restrictions, and information can be entered manually in a simple, intuitive way, minimizing the number of clicks. Editing fields can also be completed by voice, using available smartphone features.

All entries can be edited and deleted in the app. You can also export all data to the cloud (an online data server). This creates a backup copy in case of data loss on your smartphone.

The notebook is designed primarily for box hives. By default, boxes hold 10 frames, but this can be adjusted individually for each hive. Apiaries, hives, boxes, and frames are distinguished by their number. The apiary and hive numbers are assigned by the beekeeper when adding a hive to the apiary. This method allows for the creation of any number of apiaries with any number of hives. The frames and frames have default numbers. The body on the bottom is numbered 1, while the others on top are assigned sequential numbers. Therefore, the body number determines its current position in the hive. The same applies to frames. Frame number 1 is the first frame on the left side of the hive. Subsequent frames are assigned numbers corresponding to their position in the hive.

To create an apiary and individual hives, add a hive using the “+” icon.

The default settings are Apiary No. 1 and Hive No. 1. Select the hive type and type from the drop-down lists. The next field contains 10 – the default number of frames that can fit in the body. This number should be changed to reflect the actual size.

After saving the default settings, apiary no. 1 will be created, containing one hive numbered 1. You can immediately create more hives by entering the desired number in the “Number of Hives” field. In this case, the hive number will be the number of the first hive created, and the remaining hives will receive sequential numbers. The hive type and frame count will be identical in this created group of hives.

Create the required number of apiaries and hives in the same way.

In addition to adding hives and apiaries, you can move or delete a hive here. Moving a hive within the same apiary allows you to change the hive number.

Clicking the apiary icon takes you to a list of all hives in the apiary. For each hive, general information about the most recently entered hive data is displayed. This information can be changed using the “eye” icon at the top of the screen. This information can include:

1. data about the hive’s resources from the last frame inspection, along with information about the queen bee in that hive,
2. information about the last feeding or the amount of varroa collected after the last treatment,
3. the amount of honey collected during the last honey harvest.

You can also view a report on the honey and pollen harvest, or a report on the varroa fall, for the entire year in individual hives.

Under each recent hive information item, you’ll find all the detailed information entered by the beekeeper. It’s divided into seven categories:

1. Frame Inspection
2. Equipment
3. Family
4. Queen
5. Harvest
6. Feeding
7. Treatment

During inspections can be recorded information about the percentage of the frame occupied by drone brood, covered brood, larvae, eggs, pollen, honey in the dotting phase, seald honey, honey wax and wax comb honey can be recorded. The value provided can be for the left side of the frame, the right side of the frame, or both sides. The frame page can be specified as a stand-alone command or together with resource information. Information about the frame side should be provided only if we want to set a different one.

Additionally, you can save information about the presence of the queen on the frame and one of the five colors of its marking, the number of queen cells left during the inspection and the number of queen cells removed.

You can also specify what activities need to do on the frame and what activities have been done. In the group of activities to be done, which are visible in the drawing of the hive in the form of graphic symbols above the frames, there is a work frame indicating its purpose, to extraction, to delete and to insulate, which means that the content of the frame allows it to be used to insulate the queen placed in the hive. In the group of activities already performed, which are visible in the drawing of the hive in the form of graphic symbols under the frames, it is delete the frame if it was removed during the inspection, insert the frame if it was inserted, insulation if it was placed in the insulator, move it to the left or move it to the right if it was moved to another pleace in hive.

The overview can be supplemented with a note or photo taken on the fly or added from the gallery. You can also move resource frames or entire bodies, and eliminate a hive without deleting its previous history.

In the equipment command group, you can save information about the number of frames in the hive (default: 10) and edit the hive type and model.

You can specify the cleanliness of the hive floor, activities related to pollen trap operation, and information about the frame number on which the partition grid is installed or whether it has been removed.

If an NFC tag is assigned to the hive, this information will be displayed here.

A colony can be defined by its behavior. If the family is gone, you can say that they is dead. The normal state of the colony is the motor activity of all the bees, which can be described as the fact that the colony is ok. She can be, in swarming mood, aggressive or on the contrary – gentle. In winter, it is most often in a cluster.

The second feature of the bee family is its strength. A family can be very weak, weak, strong, very strong or normal that is, without any obvious signs of strength or weakness.

You can also note the number of dead bees, for example after wintering.

The first step in this category is to register your queen. Registration requires providing the date and method of acquisition, breed, line, and optionally, her identification. Only after registering can a queen bee be “connected” to the hive. At any time, you can “disconnect” a queen from the hive or edit her details. All of the above-described actions are available in QUEEN MANAGEMENT.

You can also access MOTHERS MANAGEMENT from the start (main) screen of the application.

Detailed information about the queen includes her restriction, i.e., how she is currently placed in the hive, her quality, the method of insemination, her marking (or if the queen is not present), and her year of birth.

A “free” designation indicates that the queen has no restrictions. Confinement, however, can be confined to an isolator, placed in a cage, or isolated, for example, in a Chmara isolator.

Another characteristic of the queen is her quality. A queen can be very good, good, large, ok, poor (e.g., damaged), small, weak, or old, meaning she should be removed.

The following characteristics determine the queen’s insemination: uninseminated, inseminated, or naturally inseminated.

The fact that the queen is not present in the hive can be recorded with this command or that the queen is missing. If identified, it can be described as unmarked, meaning she has not been marked. It can also be specified that she has a white, yellow, red, green, or blue marking, and optionally an opalite number or letter designation.

During honey harvesting, individual frames with ripe honey or entire bodies or half-bodies with a set of frames filled with honey are collected from the hive. To determine the amount of honey obtained from each hive, you can count how many big or small frames were taken from a given hive for centrifugation while collecting honey from the hive. It is assumed that these frames are full of honey. Information about the number of honey frames will be converted into the number of liters and kilograms of honey obtained individually from each hive. The conversion factor for this purpose will be the average weight of honey per 1 dm² given in the Settings/Parameterization section. You can also record the amount of honey in kilograms if it is possible to determine.

The amount of collected bee pollen in the form of pollen deposited in pollen collectors can also be calculated individually for each hive. For this purpose, use a measuring cup with the capacity approved by the beekeeper. It is best to select the capacity of the measuring cup experimentally, depending on the amount of pollen collected. When collecting bee pollen from the hive, provide the number of scoops filled with bee pollen in the appropriate voice command. The number of scoops from each hive will be multiplied by the capacity of the scoop given in the Settings/Parameterization section. You can also provide a specific amount of bee pollen collected from the hive if you use a vessel with an appropriate scale to determine the capacity in liters or milliliters.

Honey and pollen harvest volumes are immediately displayed on a bar chart for each harvest date.

Food for bees during feeding is usually provided in the form of syrup or candy. Depending on the sugar to water ratio, a one to one syrup or a three to two syrup is used. You can also give syrup with a different composition, e.g. invert. Sugar candy with or without toppings is also commonly used. Voice commands must include the amount of food to be served.

You can also determine in percentage terms what amount of food has not yet been taken by the bees (left food) and was still left in the hive at the time of inspection, and possibly what percentage of food has been removed from the hive.

One way to combat varroa is to use Apiwarol tablets. Their use in the hive can be saved in the application by commanding the use of individual doses of Apiovarol or chemistry.

If you are treated with Biovar belts, you can save information about the insertion (set) or removal (delete) of the belts and the number of belts.

You may also want to record the amount of acid used in the treatment. The name of the acid and method of administration can be manually completed in the Comments field.

The measure of the effectiveness of the fight against varroa is the amount of mites on the bottom after treatment.

In this group of commands, instructions regarding other methods of treating various bee diseases will be successively added.

Settings are accessible by selecting the “gear” on the home screen. They contain several sections with additional app features:

• Data management – exporting and importing data to the cloud, deleting local data, and deleting data from the cloud;
• Parameterization – changing the default values of various app parameters;
• Calculators – calculators for calculating proportions for making syrups, cakes, and ferments; 
• Queen rearing calendar – support for multiple calendars simultaneously, with notifications;
• Language – manual selection of one of seven languages;
• Apiary locations – ability to view bee flight ranges from any location;
• NFC support – setting the method for handling hive identification after reading an NFC tag;
• Notifications – configuring reminders for tasks, inspections, feeding, and treatments;
• About the app – information and app version, activation code, and contact details.

Voice control allows you to take notes while inspecting the hive without setting down the frame or removing your gloves – the recordings are created on your smartphone based on what the beekeeper says aloud. The function is activated by pressing the “VOICE CONTROL” button on the app’s home page. Speech recognition is performed entirely on the phone, without an internet connection – recordings and utterances are not sent anywhere.

The app only recognizes commands from the list described below, not any speech. The exception is dictating a note, when everything said is recorded.

Starting and Ending a Conversation

After entering the screen, the app is on standby, meaning it listens, but only recognizes a few opening phrases. This means that a conversation held at the hive will not trigger any recording.

1. “Hey Maya start/begin” – opens the command monitoring.
2. “Hey Maya stop/done/finished” – ends the monitoring and returns to standby.

Acceptance of each command is confirmed with a short beep. If a valid command is spoken in an inappropriate context, Maya will state it explicitly, while ignoring unrecognized commands. Interrupting the phone’s operation—an incoming call, the application switching to the background, or another program occupying the microphone—always results in a return to standby.

Command structure

A command is recorded in two steps. First, the location, i.e., the place to which subsequent commands apply, is indicated, and then the data is provided. Once the location is set, it remains valid until it is changed, so, for example, subsequent resources on the same frame do not need to be assigned to it. The currently set location (apiary, hive, body, frame, frame side) is displayed on the screen at all times, along with the last recorded location. Examples of commands for setting locations:

1. “open apiary number 1,”
2. “open hive number 5,”
3. “open body number 1,” “open halfbody number 2,”
4. “open large frame number 6 on the left/right/both sides,” “frame number 10,”
5. “insert large frame number 4,” “set frames from 1 to 9.”

The same entry can be made for multiple hives at once: “open all hives” covers the entire apiary, while “set hives from 1 to 5” narrows the entry to the specified range.

What can be entered with a voice command

1. Frame overview – “drone brood 10 percent on the left,” “larvae 35 percent on the right,” as well as eggs, bee bread, honey, food, nectar, ripe honey,wax foundation, and wax comb. You can also note the presence of the queen along with the color of the mark (“red queen on the left”), the queen cells (“2 queen cells on the right”), and what remains to be done (“to delete,” “to extraction”) or has already been done (“deleted,” “insulated,” “moved left”).
2. Equipment – “number of frame in body is 10,” “grid on body number 1,” “delete grid,” “bottom board is dirty,” “bee pollen trap is on”.
3. Queen – “queen was born in 25,” “queen is virgin,” “queen is in a cage,” “queen is marked white number 55,” “queen is to exchange”.
4. Colony – “colony is gentle,” “colony is very strong,” “colony is in a cluster,” “dead bees 250 milliliters”. 
5. Feeding – “syrup one to one  1 point 5 liters,” “candy 0 point 5 kilos,” “left food 30 percent”.
6. Treatment – “chemistry 1 st dose” “insert strips 3 units,” “acid 40 milliliters,” “varroa 218 mites”.
7. Harvest – “honey harvest 10 big frame,” “bee pollen harvest 625 milliliters.”
8. Date of entry – entries are saved for today, but the date can be changed: “set other day 15,” “set other month 3,” “set other year 24,” and “set current date” restores the current day.

Fractional values are pronounced with the word point (“1 point 5 liters”).

Dictated notes

In addition to commands, you can dictate plain text, and the app will save it as spoken. A note has two destinations:

1. “note,” “write note,” “Hey Maya note for rinspection”) – the content is added to the current review of the selected hive,
2. “Hey Maya note for notepad” – a separate entry is created in the Notepad.

Dictation ends with the words “Hey Maya” or after 5 seconds of silence. If “Note Recording” is enabled in “Settings/Parameterization/Voice Control,” an audio recording is saved along with the text, which can be listened to alongside the note – useful when text is incorrectly recorded and needs to be corrected. Recordings remain on the phone; they are not sent to the cloud, and are deleted after 7 days or along with the note.

Undoing a Recording

A mistake can be undone with the command “Hey Maya undo last save/entry“. You can undo up to the last five recording commands, including those issued for all hives in the apiary. Commands that don’t save anything—setting an apiary, hive, or frame—don’t occupy a place in this history.

Help while you work

The “?” icon on the voice control screen opens the full list of commands. The “help me” command opens the same window, and after adding a directional word, only the selected section of the list is displayed – “inspection help me,” “queen help me,” “feeding help me,” “treatment help me,” “harvest help me,” “notes help me.” The window closes with the “close help” command.

The commands “hive help me,” “hive before/after help me,” “hive earlier/later help me,” allow you to view hives from previous inspections.

In the command list, bold text indicates required words, italics indicate omitted words, a slash separates selectable words, and red is an example value.

Settings

The behavior of the functions and screen display changes in “Voice Control,” available in “Settings” in the “Parameterization” section:

1. “Live body preview during commands” – instead of viewing only in portrait orientation and without a preview, the screen shows a drawing of the body updated after each recording, in portrait or landscape orientation,
2. “Note recording” – enables recording dictated notes (described above),
3. “Sound Volume“ – separately for Maya’s utterances and for confirmation tones.

Tips

1. Speak calmly and in complete phrases – the command is recognized as a whole, so a long pause in the middle of a sentence can split it into two unrecognized parts.
2. Wait for the confirmation tone before speaking the next command.
3. Before the first review, it’s worth reviewing the command list under the “?” icon – Maya understands the phrases given in it, not their arbitrary equivalents.
4. The screen doesn’t turn off during operation, so for longer reviews, it’s a good idea to have your phone charged or connected to a power bank.