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Years ago, when I was a kid, my Dad had a couple of honeybee hives on the farm for pollination. I watched in fascination as he worked with the bees. He seemed larger than life when he put on a pair of old coveralls, thick work gloves, and an old hardhat with netting. Then he would light up the smoker and wade right in. Dad never used a honey super and almost always took most of the honey when he robbed a hive. Every Spring, he had to replace both hives and that went on for several years before he finally just gave up. Now I know why none of Dad's hives ever survived the Winter. The hives never had a chance to replenish the robbed honey before Winter hit and the bees probably starved.

Since I started keeping bees for myself several years ago, I've come to realize that there's so much more to beekeeping than just setting up a hive in the Spring and robbing the honey in the Fall. Maintaining a strong, healthy hive today requires beekeepers to constantly monitor bee populations for parasites and disease. Awareness of pesticide use within the foraging range of your bees is also critical. I used to keep information about my bees on an Excel spreadsheet, but I ended up spending more time working with the spreadsheet than I did with the bees. Then I learned about databases and decided to go that route. Yes, I put in quite a bit of time up front creating the database, but other than some occasional tweaking to improve it, I haven't had to do anything else to the database except input the data.

After several years of surfing websites on the Internet, I realized that there really aren't many options available for beekeepers who want to electronically track information about their colonies. That's when it hit me that maybe other beekeepers would be interested in using an online database. I've decided to start from scratch and let everyone have a say in the design of a brand new online database that can be used to track information about queens, hives, and bee yards. I'm going to create a new category in my forum so anyone can post comments about what information they think the database should contain. From my point of view, I think it should have password protected accounts so we can have multiple users and I think that a valid email address should be required in case anyone should happen to forget their password. I'd also like to suggest that we include a valid zip code or Country Code so I can generate some aggregate reports that everybody on the site can use for comparison purposes. I don't think any personal information should be required because we just want to track bees, not ourselves, so go on out to the forum and post your comments. Hopefully with everybody pitching in, we'll come up with something that's really helpful to all beekeepers.