In the midst of global upheaval over the past year, I hope your honey bees, their native pollinator cousins, and the surrounding environments have been a source of comfort and perspective for you as they have been for me. And despite the ongoing challenges to honey bee health and their foraging environment, the resilience of the honey bee is an inspiration to all of us. This past year our own bee yards yielded the best sourwood honey flow in over ten years despite a very odd spring season, more on the sourwood flow later in another blog post.
For those keeping count at home, this past year marked ten years since HiveTracks was first launched at the Eastern Apiculture Society meeting in Boone, NC in 2010. Some of you have been with us from the beginning or at least close to it, and no matter when you joined, we appreciate all of the support, feedback, and encouragement you have given us over the years. I have taken the message of HiveTracks from my own backyard to local and regional beekeeping clubs and to bee meetings and beekeepers around the world. My message has been that we each need to know our bees in order to take better care of them and that technology can provide an assist in our endeavors. It has been quite an adventure, and we have all learned so much from each other. Given that history, I am so excited to tell you about the changes we have experienced this past year and where we are headed next.
2020 has been a transformative year for HiveTracks, with two new faces on our management team. Laura, our new COO, joins our daily calls from western North Carolina, and Max, who is growing into the role of CEO, is currently based in Germany and will join us here as soon as travel allows him to leave.
With new faces, comes new energy, new ideas, new projects, and growth. At HiveTracks, we have been dreaming about rebuilding with new technology for a while. We were waiting for the right moment to turn our ten plus years worth of experience into something new. This month, the development of our new app has started following several months of design work which many of you participated in. Developing and launching a new app is a huge undertaking, and we are thrilled to count on Anthroware, our Development Partner who not only shares our values but is located just a few foraging miles away. We will keep you posted about progress as we launch the app later this year and many of you have already participated in one of our interviews and provided great input.
Looking forward, our vision remains to deliver knowledge and information through our new app so you can make the best management decisions possible and be a better beekeeper. Thousands of beekeepers have recorded tens of thousands of management actions and hive observations. This collective knowledge we have all been able to accumulate is the proud HiveTracks legacy and will provide a strong foundation for our new app. We want to make your data actionable and want to deliver advice to you based on your beekeeping practices, your surroundings, and the community knowledge of beekeepers in your area. The new app will be your companion in the bee yard, cheering you on to better beekeeping.
2021 is packed with exciting company goals and milestones. Besides our app launch, we are thrilled to tell you that our expertise will benefit beekeepers in Ethiopia and Uzbekistan as we roll out a project in those regions later this year. More on that project and how our technology will help beekeepers in rural areas to cope with ever-changing climatic conditions in Ethiopia and Uzbekistan in our next update.
We believe that as a community of beekeepers, each one of you is making a significant contribution to a biosecure planet with healthy ecosystems as we keep healthy and productive honey bees. Our shared experiences in 2020 have taught us that this is more important than ever.
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