Terms of Use

Version: 1.0  ·  Effective: [DATE — set when published]  ·  Last updated: 22 July 2026

Please read this before you use Hive Yard. It explains what the app does and does not promise, and it limits our liability to you. The parts that matter most to a beekeeper are section 4 (the AI and other guidance), section 5 (your bees remain your responsibility), section 6 (safety), and section 7 (reminders). Those four are not boilerplate.

1. Who these terms are between

"Hive Yard", "we", "us" and "our" mean [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [company/registration number and registered address]. "You" means the person using the Hive Yard mobile app or the Hive Yard website at thehiveyard.com (together, the "Service").

By installing the app, creating an account, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. Where you accept these terms on behalf of a business or association, you confirm you are authorised to bind it, and "you" includes it.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and why. It forms part of these terms.

2. What Hive Yard is

Hive Yard is a record-keeping tool for beekeepers. It stores apiaries, hives, inspection notes, photographs, equipment counts and follow-up flags; it can suggest when to reinspect; and it offers optional AI features that help you describe what you are looking at, take notes by voice, and ask general beekeeping questions.

It is a notebook, not an authority. It records what you tell it and helps you find it again. Every judgement about your colonies remains yours.

3. Eligibility and your account

• You must be at least 13 years old to use the Service. If you are under 18, you may only use it with the involvement of a parent or guardian. [Confirm the minimum age against the jurisdictions you serve — several require 16 for consent-based processing.]
• You can use the app fully offline with no account at all. If you create an account, give accurate information and keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
• One account is for one person. Do not share, sell, or transfer it.
• Tell us promptly at admin@thehiveyard.com if you believe someone else has access to your account.

4. The AI features, and all other guidance in the app

Everything the Service tells you is general information for education, not advice. It is not veterinary advice, not agricultural or apicultural consultancy, not medical advice, not legal or regulatory advice, and not a substitute for a qualified person who can see your colonies.

• The AI can be wrong. Photo analysis, the voice inspection agent and the question-and- answer tutor are powered by third-party generative AI models. They can misidentify, miss things entirely, and state incorrect information confidently. Treat every output as a possibility to check yourself, which is how the Service is deliberately written to present it.
• It is not a diagnosis. A photograph or a spoken description cannot establish what a colony has. Where a finding matters, the Service will tell you the check to perform and point you to your state apiary inspector, local extension office, or an experienced local beekeeper. Please use them.
• We do not recommend treatments. The Service is designed never to name a miticide, antibiotic, chemical, dose or treatment schedule, because what is approved varies by location, by season, and by whether honey supers are on. If anything in the Service ever appears to recommend a treatment, do not act on it — confirm with a qualified source and please tell us.
• Keyword detection is not screening. The Service raises flags by matching words in your notes. It will miss problems you did not write down, and it will flag things you did not mean. It is a convenience, not a diagnostic sweep.
• Scheduling suggestions are rules of thumb. A suggested reinspection interval is arithmetic, not a judgement about your colony.

5. Your bees, your decisions, your legal duties

You are solely responsible for the health, management and welfare of your colonies, and for every decision you make about them, whether or not you used the Service in reaching it.

We do not promise that using Hive Yard will keep colonies alive, increase yield, detect disease, prevent swarming or loss, or improve outcomes in any way.

You are responsible for complying with the law where you keep bees. This includes:

• Notifiable and reportable diseases. American and European foulbrood, and other conditions depending on where you are, may be legally reportable. The Service does not report anything to anyone on your behalf. Its escalation messages are prompts to you, and nothing more. Meeting a reporting duty, and the deadline attached to it, is yours alone.
• Apiary registration, hive identification and record-keeping requirements.
• Restrictions on moving bees, colonies, frames or used equipment between areas.
• Local rules on where hives may be kept, nuisance, and neighbours.
• Food safety, labelling, traceability and sales law if you sell honey or other hive products.
• Any treatment you apply, including whether it is approved for use on colonies producing honey for sale, and any residue or withdrawal requirements.

Records you keep in Hive Yard may not satisfy a legal record-keeping obligation. Check what your jurisdiction requires, and keep whatever else it demands.

6. Safety

Beekeeping is physically hazardous. Stings can cause severe allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, in people with no previous history. Hives are heavy, apiaries are uneven, smokers carry fire risk, and hive tools are sharp.

• The Service does not make beekeeping safe and takes no part in your physical safety. Wear appropriate protection, know your own and your helpers' allergy status, and have a plan for a reaction.
• Do not let the app distract you at an open hive. The voice features exist so you can keep your hands and eyes on the colony — not so you can look at a screen while working live bees. Stop and stand clear if you need to look at your phone.
• Never use the Service while driving or operating machinery, including the voice features.
• If you are having a severe allergic reaction, stop and get emergency medical help. Do not ask the app.

7. Reminders and notifications are best-effort

The Service can remind you about a scheduled inspection and alert you when equipment runs low. These are conveniences and may not arrive. Android battery optimisation, Doze, notification permissions, a powered-off or offline device, a cleared app, or a change on our side can all delay or suppress them without warning.

Do not rely on Hive Yard as the only prompt for anything that matters — a treatment window, a reinspection after a disease finding, a swarm check, or a legal deadline. Keep your own diary for those.

8. Your content, and what we do with it

• Your records are yours. Your notes, photographs and other content remain your property. We claim no ownership of them.
• You grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, copy, transmit and display your content solely so we can operate the Service for you — for example, syncing it between your phone and the website, and sending a photograph to our AI provider at the moment you ask for it to be analysed. This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except for backups that age out on our ordinary cycle.
• You confirm you have the right to upload what you upload, and that it does not infringe anyone else's rights or contain other people's personal information without their knowledge.
• Feedback you send us — bug reports, ideas, suggestions — we may use without obligation or payment to you.
• Hive Yard, its name, logo, design, text and software are ours and are protected by intellectual property law. These terms give you a personal, revocable, non-transferable licence to use the Service, and nothing more.

9. Data, backups and loss

Hive Yard is offline-first: your records live on your device, and sync to our servers only if you sign in. That design has consequences you should understand.

• If you do not sign in, we have no copy of your data. Uninstalling the app, clearing its storage, losing the device, or a device failure will lose everything on it, permanently.
• Syncing is best-effort, not a backup service. Where the same record is changed in two places, the most recent change generally wins and the other is lost.
• An app update may need to reset local data. We try hard to avoid it, and we sync first where we can, but we cannot guarantee that local records always survive an upgrade.
• Deleting your account is permanent and immediate. It removes your records from our servers and cannot be undone by us.
• Export or photograph anything you cannot afford to lose. We are not liable for lost records, and we do not undertake to restore them.

10. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• use the Service unlawfully, or to break any rule that applies to keeping bees where you are;
• use the AI features to obtain or provide diagnosis, prescription or professional advice — to yourself or to anyone else — or to run any kind of advisory service for third parties;
• attempt to make the AI ignore its instructions or produce harmful, unlawful, hateful or deceptive content, or present its output as professional advice;
• upload anything unlawful, malicious, infringing, or containing another person's personal information without a lawful basis;
• reverse engineer, decompile, scrape, or attempt to extract our source code, prompts or models, except to the extent the law says you may;
• probe, overload, disrupt or circumvent any limit, gate or security measure — including the checks that separate free from paid features;
• resell, sublicense or commercially exploit the Service without our written agreement;
• use automated means to create accounts or generate load beyond ordinary personal use.

We may impose reasonable usage limits on the AI features. They cost us money per use, and fair-use limits are how they stay available.

11. Third-party services

The Service is built on Google Firebase and uses Google's Gemini models for its AI features. Sign-in with Google, app distribution through Google Play, and cloud storage are likewise third-party services. Their availability, performance and terms are outside our control, and your use of them may be governed by their own terms. We are not responsible for their acts or omissions.

Links to outside resources — inspector directories, extension services, suppliers, conferences — are offered for convenience. We do not endorse them and are not responsible for their content or for anything you obtain from them.

12. Paid features

• Hive Yard has a free tier and a Premium tier. Premium currently unlocks higher-quality photo storage, AI photo analysis, the AI voice inspection agent and the AI question-and-answer tutor. What sits in each tier may change.
• Billing is not live at the time of writing. During the field-test period Premium is unlocked by code and nothing is charged. When paid subscriptions begin we will publish the price and terms and give you notice before charging you anything.
• Where you buy through Google Play, the purchase is subject to Google's terms and refunds are handled under Google's policy. Where you have a statutory right to cancel or refund, these terms do not remove it.
• An unlock code is personal to you. Sharing or publishing one may result in it and your account being disabled.

13. The Service will change, and may be unavailable

Hive Yard is actively developed. We may add, change, suspend or remove features, and we may limit or discontinue the Service. We will give reasonable notice of anything significant where we can, and we will try to give you a way to export your records before we discontinue a service you rely on.

We do not promise the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, or error-free.

14. Disclaimer of warranties

To the fullest extent the law allows, the Service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied — including implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service, its AI output, its detections or its reminders are accurate, complete, timely or suitable for any decision you make about your colonies, your health, or your legal obligations.

Nothing in these terms excludes any warranty or right that cannot lawfully be excluded. If your local consumer law gives you rights that these terms would otherwise limit, those rights stand.

15. Limitation of liability

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for:

• loss of, or damage to, bees, colonies, queens, brood, honey, wax, equipment or other property;
• lost profits, lost yield, lost opportunity, business interruption, or the cost of replacement bees or equipment;
• lost, corrupted or unrecoverable records;
• fines, penalties or enforcement action arising from a legal duty you did not meet, including a disease-reporting duty;
• any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss.

Our total liability to you for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of [the amount you paid us for the Service in that period] and [CURRENCY AND AMOUNT — e.g. the equivalent of one year's subscription, or a fixed floor]. [Your solicitor should set this cap and check it is enforceable in each jurisdiction you serve; a cap that is unreasonable can be struck out entirely, leaving no cap at all.]

16. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your misuse of the Service, your breach of these terms, your content, or your failure to meet a legal duty relating to your bees. [Consider whether this is appropriate against consumers in your jurisdiction — in several it is unenforceable or must be narrowed.]

17. Suspension and termination

You may stop using the Service at any time, and delete your account from the app or the website.

We may suspend or terminate your access if you materially breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if we discontinue the Service. Where it is reasonable to do so, we will warn you first and give you a chance to export your records. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — content licence for material already processed, disclaimers, liability limits, indemnity, governing law — do survive it.

18. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version number and date at the top will change. For a material change we will ask you to accept the new version in the app or on the website before you carry on using the Service, and for anything significant we will give reasonable notice first. Continuing to use the Service after a change means you accept it.

19. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of [JURISDICTION], and the courts of [JURISDICTION] have [exclusive/non-exclusive] jurisdiction. [If you serve consumers in the EU/UK, you generally cannot deprive them of the protection of their home law or their local courts — your solicitor must draft this clause for the markets you actually distribute in, which for a Play listing may be most of the world.]

[Decide whether to include arbitration and a class-action waiver. Both are common in US-facing terms and largely unenforceable against consumers in the UK and EU.]

If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest continues in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them to a successor of our business.

20. Google Play

Where you obtained the app through Google Play, you acknowledge that these terms are between you and us, not Google; that Google is not responsible for the app or its content; and that Google has no obligation to provide support for it.

21. Contact

Questions about these terms: admin@thehiveyard.com
Privacy questions: privacy@thehiveyard.com

Privacy Policy