Some new buttons have appeared on the login and signup pages! I’ve just implemented Facebook logins. This means that you don’t even need to set up an account to use Beetight: you can use your Facebook account instead. Also, if you already have a Beetight account, if the email address is the same you can use your Facebook account to login as well. It’s quite simple: you just click “Login with Facebook”. This pops up a window that asks you to grant access. We only need your publicly available information. We also ask for your email address so we can check if you already have a Beetight account and log you into that. Don’t worry: we never see your Facebook password or anything like that.

Hopefully this should all be quite simple, and make it even easier to get started. I thought that as Facebook is our biggest source of users it would make sense to let you use your Facebook login.

A request that has come up a few times from Beetight users with large numbers of hives is that they’d like a way to add or edit several at once. The good news is that you can now add several hives at once. You choose the number of hives you want to create, which type they are, and what the colony source is, and it adds them all in one go. You can add up to 1000 at a time, which should save a lot of time for those of you with lots of hives. Certainly easier than filling in the details a thousand times! Here’s a screenshot:

Try it for yourself here, though before you go creating hundreds as a test, remember there’s currently no way to bulk delete them!

Hi all. I’m currently working on all of the requests for extra inspection fields. What I plan to do is to let users set a preference for which fields to show, so that people can choose how to use it without having the forms grow unmanageably large. There are lots of useful suggestions on the Get Satisfaction site, but a definitive list of suggestions here would be good. I’ll start it off with the ones I can assemble from those already suggested.

Some possible ideas. You’ll be able to turn these on or off if you don’t need them:

• Orientation flights seen (0-5 scale)
• Pollen seen going in (0-5 scale)
• Foraging bees seen (0-5 scale)
• Traffic per minute (count)
• Bees on ground
• Comb building (0-5 scale)
• Young larvae seen (y/n)
• Frames sealed brood (count)
• Frames of open brood (count)
• Frames of pollen (count)
• Frames of honey/nectar (count)
• Total frames of bees (count)
• Supercedure cells (count)
• Swarm cells (count)
• Weather conditions
• Temperature
• Humidity
• Wind
• Barometric pressure

Any other suggestions?

I’ve just released a brand new feature that quite a few people have requested. You can view all of your apiaries at a glance on a large map, and click to see details about each one. You can also display them in Google Earth by clicking the button to download the KMZ file. It’s particularly useful if you have hives in lots of locations. Here’s a pic.

It’s a feature just for Pro users, so if you haven’t upgraded yet you’ll need to if you want to give it a try. This is the first of several new features planned for Pro users that I’ll be releasing in the next few weeks. Watch this space!

In related matters, you can also now manually specify the latitude and longitude of an apiary, as well as the existing GPS and address methods. As usual, let me know what you think of the changes.