Reviewed August 2026 against USDA NASS, USDA ERS and IRS Publication 225.

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Agricultural Software for Beekeepers: What It Must Track

Agricultural software for an apiary has to do four separate jobs: log what you saw inside each hive, cost the operation down to the colony, produce the records a state apiary program and the IRS will ask for, and follow each drum of honey to the buyer who took it. Free beekeeping software does the first job well and the other three partially. This page maps each record type to the body that wants it, the retention period attached to it, and the point at which a free tier stops being enough.

The numbers behind that decision moved sharply. USDA NASS’s Honey report released 13 March 2026 put 2025 U.S. production at 116 million pounds from 2.41 million honey-producing colonies — a 14 percent drop in output on a 7 percent drop in colonies and a 7 percent drop in yield, to 48.0 pounds per colony. Average price ran the other way, from $2.41 per pound in 2024 to $3.05 in 2025, up 27 percent. Fewer pounds at a higher price is exactly the situation where per-colony costing stops being optional.

That range is the argument for record-keeping in one image. The 2024–25 U.S. Beekeeping Survey run by Auburn University and the Apiary Inspectors of America put national annual loss at 55.6 percent — the highest since the series began in 2010–11 — with winter loss at 40.2 percent, past the previous record of 37.7 percent. It drew on 2,453 beekeepers reporting 219,097 colonies as of 1 October 2024, roughly 8.4 percent of the national managed stock. Some states lost a third; some lost nine colonies in ten. Which end you landed on is not luck you can reconstruct from memory a year later.

The four record layers an apiary carries

Every apiary, from twelve hives to twelve thousand, keeps the same four stacks of paper. Software is worth paying for at the point where one stack starts feeding another.

1. Inspection records — queen status, brood pattern, stores, mite counts, treatments applied and dates. Per hive, per visit.
2. Financial records — income by channel, expenses by category, depreciable assets, inventory. This is the agricultural bookkeeping layer, and it is the one the IRS reads.
3. Regulatory records — state apiary registration, pesticide applications, movement permits, food facility registration if you pack.
4. Product records — extraction lots, moisture, storage, which buyer received which drum.

Agricultural bookkeeping: what the IRS actually asks for

Beekeeping income is farm income and reports on Schedule F (Form 1040). IRS Publication 225, the Farmer’s Tax Guide (2025 revision) is unusually permissive about format: the law does not require a specific kind of record, only a system that clearly shows income and expenses, backed by supporting documents — invoices, receipts, payroll, sales. Electronic records are explicitly acceptable. Publication 225 also covers the choice between cash and accrual accounting and the farm inventory valuation methods available, including the farm-price and unit-livestock-price methods.

What that permissiveness means in practice: nobody will reject your spreadsheet, but nobody will reconstruct it for you either. The failure mode is not format, it is granularity. A single “bee supplies” line for the year cannot tell you whether your almond routes paid or your honey did. Publication 225 makes the same point in its own words — detailed records help identify which enterprise is most profitable and where management changes are needed.

Sector-wide, margins are the reason to bother. USDA ERS’s farm income forecast released 7 May 2026 put 2026 net farm income at $153.4 billion, down 0.7 percent from 2025 in nominal terms and 2.6 percent adjusted for inflation, with average net cash farm income for farm businesses forecast at $135,000. ERS revises that forecast several times a year, so treat any figure quoted from it as a snapshot and pull the current one from the page above before you plan against it.

Beekeeping software free tiers: where they stop

Searches for beekeeping software free are usually asking one question: can I run the whole operation without paying? For inspection logging, yes. Several hive-management apps offer a genuinely free tier — commonly capped by hive count or by monthly AI analyses — and open-source options exist, including self-hostable projects and the BEEP sensor stack. Offline capture matters more than feature lists here, because most yards have no signal.

Free tiers reliably stop at three places. First, multi-user roles: one login is fine until you have a second person opening hives. Second, financial depth — free apps track honey sold, not depreciation schedules, hive-loan amortisation or per-yard cost allocation. Third, exportable audit trails: a compliance record you cannot export as a dated, immutable file is not a compliance record. Check export before you commit, not after.

Record layer comparison table

Registration, pesticide and colony-health records

Registration is a state matter and the rules are specific, not general. Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services requires every beekeeper with colonies in the state to register, renewed annually before the anniversary date, with the department invoicing 30 days ahead. Fees run on a colony-count ladder, and inspections happen at intervals FDACS deems necessary, so each site must stay physically accessible. Chapter 586, Florida Statutes carries the penalties: a first-degree misdemeanour for a first offence and a third-degree felony afterwards, with fines up to $5,000. Other states set their own fees and deadlines — Washington and Rhode Island both operate registration programmes — so read your own department’s page rather than a national summary.

Pesticide records changed at the federal level. The USDA rescinded the federal restricted-use pesticide recordkeeping requirement for private applicators under 7 CFR Part 110, effective 11 July 2025, as University of Illinois Extension documents. The old federal standard was six elements — product name and EPA registration number, total amount applied, location, size of area treated and crop or site, date, and the applicator’s name and certification number — held for two years. That federal floor is gone; state requirements are not, and Worker Protection Standard obligations are separate. Keep recording the six elements anyway. They are what a drift claim on your yards gets adjudicated against.

On colony health, USDA NASS runs a quarterly Colony Loss Survey covering roughly 3,300 operations with five or more colonies, published as the annual Honey Bee Colonies report. The 3 August 2026 release recorded 2.84 million colonies on those operations in April–June 2026, with 321,910 lost — an 11 percent quarterly rate — and varroa mites affecting 26.3 percent of colonies. Varroa was the number-one reported stressor in every quarter surveyed.

Why the counts matter more than they used to: USDA ARS reported on 2 June 2025 that bees from the 2024–25 collapse event carried high levels of deformed wing virus A and B and acute bee paralysis virus, spread by Varroa destructor mites showing amitraz resistance in virtually every mite collected. Commercial operations lost over 60 percent of colonies from the previous summer — about 1.7 million colonies, an estimated $600 million impact. When a treatment stops working, the only way to know is a dated series of mite-wash counts before and after application. That is a software job.

Agricultural distribution software: hives out, honey in

An apiary runs two distribution problems in opposite directions. Colonies move out to pollination contracts on a tight calendar; honey moves in to extraction, into drums, and out to packers. Both need lot identity, both need routing, and neither is served by an inspection app.

The pollination side is where the money concentrates. USDA ERS, drawing on NASS data, valued U.S. pollination services at $400 million across 1.728 million acres in 2024. Almonds alone accounted for roughly 81 percent of receipts — $325.8 million — and the Pacific Southwest region took about $353 million, 88 percent of the national total. Almond fees averaged $181 per colony against $66 for other crops; NASS’s Cost of Pollination report released 13 February 2026 put the 2025 almond average at $209 per colony, up 15 percent, with the per-acre figure at $310.

Read that concentration as a scheduling constraint. Eighty-eight percent of the money sits in one region during one bloom window, which means routing, permits and contract records all compress into a few weeks. Route and asset tracking belongs in a fleet management layer rather than a hive log — you are tracking pallets, trucks and delivery confirmations, not frames.

On the honey side, price discovery is public and refreshes monthly: USDA AMS publishes the National Honey Report, giving prices paid to beekeepers for extracted, unprocessed honey by state and colour class. Check it before you sign, not after. NASS also reported producer honey stocks of 34.8 million pounds on 15 December 2025, down from 40.8 million a year earlier — thinner carryover, which is worth knowing when a packer proposes a forward price.

Lot-level provenance is what turns those drums into a defensible product claim. Blockchain-backed product traceability ties a batch to its source yard, extraction date and handling record, which is the evidence a buyer’s audit asks for. Where a buyer also wants an emissions figure attached to the consignment, carbon footprinting covers the transport and operations side of that claim.

Break-even calculator: what a colony has to earn

Enter your own cost and loss figures; the defaults are the USDA figures cited above, not your operation.

Where satellite data fits

Hive software tells you what happened inside the box. It cannot tell you what the forage did. Satellite vegetation indices over a yard's foraging radius give a dated record of when bloom started and how green the surroundings stayed — which is the missing variable when one yard yields 60 pounds and another 30. Farmonaut supplies that layer: multispectral monitoring of the land around each apiary site, Jeevn AI advisories built on live field and weather data, traceability for honey lots, and exportable reports for compliance filings.

A verification checklist that outlives the figures

Every number on this page will move. The method for refreshing them will not. Work through this once a year:

1. Production, colonies, yield and price. USDA NASS Honey, released each March. Pull the current release from the NASS Today's Reports directory.
2. Quarterly colonies, losses and stressors. USDA NASS Honey Bee Colonies, released each August, covering operations with five or more colonies.
3. Pollination fees. USDA NASS Cost of Pollination, released January to March, surveying about 16,000 crop producers each autumn.
4. Wholesale honey prices. USDA AMS National Honey Report, monthly.
5. Sector income. USDA ERS farm income forecast, revised several times a year.
6. Your state's rules. Registration fee, renewal date and pesticide record retention — from your own state department of agriculture, since the federal 7 CFR 110 floor no longer applies.
7. Your own break-even. Re-run the calculator above with the season's actual loss rate and cost per colony, not the defaults.

FAQ

Is there genuinely free beekeeping software?

Yes for inspection logging. Free tiers are usually capped by hive count or monthly AI analyses, and open-source, self-hostable projects exist. Test offline capture and data export before committing — those are the two features free tiers most often withhold.

What does agricultural bookkeeping have to include for a beekeeper?

A summary of business transactions showing gross income, expenses, deductions and credits, plus supporting invoices and receipts. IRS Publication 225 does not mandate a format and accepts electronic records. Beekeeping income reports on Schedule F (Form 1040).

Do I still have to keep restricted-use pesticide records?

The federal requirement for private applicators under 7 CFR Part 110 was rescinded effective 11 July 2025. State requirements and Worker Protection Standard obligations are unaffected — check your state department of agriculture.

How many colonies do I need before paid software pays for itself?

The threshold is not a colony count, it is a second person. Once anyone other than you opens a hive, or once you place colonies under contract, single-user free tiers start losing data. Run the calculator above with your subscription cost folded into cost per colony.

Does agricultural distribution software matter for a honey operation?

It does once you are moving pallets to pollination contracts or drums to a packer. Almonds took about 81 percent of the $400 million in 2024 U.S. pollination receipts, concentrated in one bloom window — routing, permits and delivery confirmations all compress into a few weeks, which is a logistics problem, not a hive-log problem.