Logging inspections
Open a hive and narrate. One sentence or five — Stinger extracts the data and writes one inspection record for the colony you are on.
- "Bench 1 — queen seen, eggs, solid brood pattern, calm."
- "Three mites on the board. Added a medium super."
- "Bench 3 is queenless, no eggs, backfilling. Cell Builder queen right with milk brood." — two colonies in one sentence, each gets its own record.
What it listens for: queen status, eggs, capped and open brood, brood frames, queen cells, mite counts, temperament, strength, frames in use, boxes added or removed, feeding, treatments, deadouts and their cause — plus any free-form note, kept verbatim.
What you hear back depends on Settings → Voice Response Style: Standard and Detailed read back everything it recorded, your note word for word (Detailed will add some background in a later update); Brief reads back the values and says "plus your note" instead of the note; Silent stays quiet for a routine log. Any coaching follows a few seconds after the confirmation.
Held to check. If Stinger isn't sure it heard an entry right, it doesn't file it and doesn't drop it: it says so and keeps the entry in Needs Attention, where you can check it: file an inspection to its colony, or discard what you didn't say. The Needs Attention list shows how many entries are waiting; it opens with the newest 200, and Load older brings the rest, 200 at a time.
Brood: "Six frames of brood." records six frames of brood — any stage, halves allowed ("capped brood on two and a half frames"). Brood is never strength: "six frames of bees" is the colony's strength, "six frames of brood" is its brood. "I see capped brood." records capped brood seen; "six frames of brood, all capped" records both. Capped brood with no eggs is the queen-loss signal the status read-back keeps.
Queen seen is a sighting, not a status: "Queen seen." records that you saw her and nothing more. Say the status when you know it — "queen seen, laying well", "queenright", "queenless", "virgin queen".
Nucs: say the box and Stinger records it as a nuc with its frame capacity — "It's a five frame nuc." · "Pro nuc, queen seen." (a Pro Nuc is five frames) · "It's a nuc, six frames." The capacity is what "weak" and "needs space" are judged against later. A "wooden nuc" or a bare "nuc" records no capacity — Stinger never invents one — and is judged as a five-frame box until you say the count.
Supers: "Added a medium super." records the box you named. Say just "added a super" and Stinger uses your organization's hive configuration (Settings → Organization) to pick the box — a hive short of its base gets a base box, a complete one gets your super type; with no configuration set, it asks which box. You say the change, Stinger counts: it adds the box to what the colony's record already shows and works out the new totals itself.
Plans are notes, not facts. "I combined it with the neighbor yesterday" changes the colony's status. "I'm going to combine this one Friday" does not — the plan is kept as a note and the colony stays active until you say it happened. Stinger records what occurred, never what is intended.
Photos
Tap the camera in the message bar to photograph a frame; then speak the observation that goes with it. The photo rides with your words, and Stinger reads the frame too (a count of bees is an estimate, never gospel). The flower icon is the bloom lens — for what is flowering near the apiary, not for hive interiors: snap it and say what it is, e.g. "sourwood starting to bloom by the fence." With the bloom lens on, "take a picture" opens the bloom camera hands-free — no colony needed.
Corrections
- Misspoke just now? Say it again plainly: "Correction — that was three mites, not two." A correction is a new record pointing at the old one; nothing is ever silently edited.
- Rejecting what was just logged works the same way: "That is an incorrect observation — it was three mites, not two." Stinger reverts the wrong record and files the corrected one in the same turn. A plain "that's wrong" with no restatement reverts and waits for you to say it again.
- "Revert that last inspection." — undo within the session (and recoverable after).
- Filed to the wrong colony? While still on that colony, say "Those last two observations belong on Bench 2." — Stinger moves the most recent observations off the colony you are on. If you have already moved on, go back to it first (say its name).
When a record is dated
A record is dated when your phone captured it, not when it reached the server. Speak in an apiary with no signal and the record keeps that time, even if it uploads an hour later. One guard: a record is never dated later than the moment the server received it, so a phone clock that runs ahead cannot file anything in the future.
Each colony's current state is worked out from its records, newest reading first. A late record — one that uploads after newer ones, or one filed for an earlier day — slots in on its own day, and Stinger rebuilds that day and every day after it. A newer reading still wins over an older one, whichever arrived first. Undoing or restoring a record rebuilds the same way, so the colony's state always matches what is on record.