I have been keeping bees in the Upstate of South Carolina since 2024. I started with two hives; those two hives swarmed a bunch in the summer of 2025, and I now keep five hives in my backyard apiary.

The colonies have been reasonably successful, and I've stopped worrying about whether the bees are okay and started worrying about the stuff that marks the true worth of a beekeeper: hive management, swarm management, and catching health problems early enough to do something about them.

My day job is infrastructure automation. I run a small consultancy that handles DevOps for clients who cannot justify a full-time hire but still need their production systems to be reliable, recoverable, and not held together with duct tape. Years of cleaning up tech debt and tech sprawl give one strong opinions about tools that "almost" work, and a bit of an allergy to solutions that fit into said category.

HiveCraft started with some ever-so-elusive downtime and a nerdy desire to attempt to increase the downtime using knowledge from outside the beekeeping industry. One afternoon I realized I had enough hives that managing or tracking their status was cumbersome when left to my own ability to remember the facts about each hive. Being an AI nerd, my first instinct was to build a skill for my AI agent that I could just speak to or text to. That led to realizing someone had probably built an app for managing hives. But I wanted to build something myself. So... "Perhaps I can build something that solves a problem in the beekeeping world." Time to discover what pain points existed around current app solutions. And then downloading the apps to see if the pain points were correct. And then doing market research to see if there was enough market to launch a similar but better application.

Turns out several beekeeping apps exist. And guess what! They "almost" work. I installed a couple. I will probably install more to continue testing what works and what doesn't. The apps exist. But so far every one of them has a combination of the pain points I want to solve: dense screens designed for a desk, features buried three taps deep, and interactions that assume bare fingers and a stable internet connection. None of them felt built by someone who had actually tried to use them while gloved, distracted, and standing over an open hive. This isn't to say that they were in fact built by someone who had never been in an apiary. Just that they didn't feel complete. They needed more feedback cycles and improvements. But... I wanted to build something myself.

So I started building the app I wished existed and the one I thought could improve beekeepers' abilities to manage their hives in the modern technical world. HiveCraft is shaped around a single question: Can I actually do this while I'm standing in front of a hive, covered in bees, with gloves on in a remote location? Anything that doesn't pass that test gets redesigned until it does.

Longer term, I want HiveCraft to give something back to the beekeeping community in ways the app itself can't. If enough beekeepers opt in, I'd like to share anonymized trend data with apiculture researchers, state pollinator health programs, and university scientists. Real field data they can't get anywhere else. That's a long game, but it's why I'm building HiveCraft on open, portable infrastructure instead of a walled garden. And if I ever do that, it'll only be with research partners whose interests align with beekeepers', never with pesticide manufacturers or data brokers.

If you have questions, feedback, or just want to swap bee stories, I read every message that comes to [email protected].