My father recently discovered a passion for beekeeping.
It’s surprising how much care bees require: each beehive needs dedicated attention from early spring to late summer.
To help him with this, we created together Notebeezzz, an app for taking notes on each beehive.
Let me walk you through the design process of this simple tool.
The process
This application is almost a textbook case:
- A pain point expressed directly by the “business” (my father)
- A domain I knew nothing about
- A qualification phase to turn needs into a list of requirements
- A few development iterations
- Leading to a tool used consistently for multiple years
Understanding the business
The beekeeper mainly inspects hives, checking the health of each one and taking action if necessary.
A hive is made of a main body and multiple “honey supers” — where bees store honey for the winter (and what’s harvested).
In a hive, there are thousands of bees, and one queen.
Worker bees live 2–6 weeks in spring and summer, up to 20 weeks in winter. The queen can live up to 6 years.
To identify the queen, beekeepers mark her with a colored dot. The color changes each year in a 6-year cycle.
When the queen dies or the hive is about to split, a new unmarked queen appears. Tracking the queen’s color gives valuable insight.
Honey is collected multiple times a year. Harvesting can take several days, both in the field and at the honey house under controlled humidity.
Understanding the need
Before this app, my father recorded audio notes in the field, then rewrote them into his phone’s default notes app.
When reviewing a hive, he had to search for old notes to adapt his actions — slow, ineffective, and prone to losing information.
From examining his notes, we found he really only needed to capture:
- Date
- Whether the queen was seen, and her color (or “unmarked”)
- A textual comment (actions, observations)
But these needed to be organized by hive, and during harvest, by super.
A prototype
From there, I developed a first prototype using Flutter and SQLite.
It allowed us to define hives (with basic information) and then add comments.
Making it used
Once my father started using it, he quickly passed a thousand comments — some about hives, some detailed about supers.
Adding features
Once the core features were stable and the main pain point was solved, we added more:
- Archiving at the end of the season
- Feature flags to prevent accidental edits after hive creation
- Internationalization
- Import/export for phone transfer
- Harvesting overview
- Design improvements
No agile meetings, no ceremony — just going straight to the point and iterating.
Conclusion
Notebeezzz successfully addresses the core needs of beekeeping note-taking with a straightforward, focused design. It’s now a stable, reliable app that my father uses regularly, making his work easier without unnecessary complexity. Sometimes the best tools are the simplest ones — built with care, purpose, and a clear understanding of the problem.
The application is now available on google play