Varroa is the leading cause of colony loss. Knowing how many mites fall onto the board, and when the threshold is crossed, decides whether and when to treat. bjtOS does it from a photo: frame the tray from your phone and the count comes back on its own.
Fallen mites detected on the board since the last cleaning. Result in mites per day, ready to compare with the treatment threshold.
Counting the natural mite drop on the varroa board is the most common way to estimate an infestation. But doing it by hand, mite by mite, on a tray full of debris takes time, good eyesight and patience. And an inaccurate count leads you to treat too late, or to treat when you didn't need to.
No accessory to fit on the hive: all you need is the varroa board you already use and the phone in your pocket.
Pull out the diagnostic tray, already divided into four quadrants, and take one photo per quadrant from the app. An on-screen guide tells you how to frame it, at full resolution, so even a one-millimetre mite stays legible.
Reference markers printed on the tray let the system correct the perspective and know the true scale. On that rectified image the algorithm locates and counts the fallen mites, quadrant by quadrant.
The result is the total and the drop in mites per day, computed over the days since the tray was last cleaned. It stays in the hive's history, together with the notes on the treatments you have done.
Nobody photographs a tray perfectly square and at the same distance every time. That is why the tray carries reference markers: from them the system reconstructs the real geometry, corrects the tilt and derives the scale in millimetres. The count does not depend on how you held the phone, but on what is actually on the tray.
Perspective corrected and scale known from the markers. The count works on the real image of the tray, not on the photo taken at an angle.
Once processing is done, the result is on the hive's card together with the rest: weight, climate, alerts. With the same notification you already get for other events.
The varroa counter is not a separate tool to learn from scratch: it lives in the same platform where you read the apiary's weight, climate and alerts. The history of the counts sits next to that of the honey super, so varroa pressure and the colony's trend read together. And, like everything else, without a phone subscription per hive.
The mite-drop count is an estimate of the infestation, not an absolute measure: the treatment threshold changes with the season and the strength of the colony. bjtOS gives you a reliable, repeatable figure to reason about, but the decision to treat stays yours, with your experience. We are calibrating the count on real trays from the beekeepers in the pilot, to make it steadily more accurate.
We are building a digital-native hive in which varroa monitoring, too, is part of the design.
If you'd like to try it, tell us about your apiaries.