Connecting Honeylink scales

If you run Honeylink scales, you can connect them to bee-pilot.io. The weight of your colonies then flows into your beekeeping journal automatically, and you no longer have to switch between two applications.

What is taken over — and what is not

What is taken over is the weight. Other values your scale may record — temperature, battery level, voltage, signal strength — are currently not transferred and do not appear in bee-pilot.io.

Worth knowing: there is no import of your previous readings. Your weight curve in bee-pilot.io starts on the day you establish the connection and grows from there with every sync. Older data stays in your Honeylink account.

Step 1: create an access key

Open your Honeylink portal and create a personal access token there. Make sure it carries these two permissions:

• read:apiaries
• read:hives

Without them, bee-pilot.io cannot retrieve any readings later on.

Step 2: establish the connection

Open Settings → Integrations and tap Activate on the Honeylink card. Enter the key and tap Test connection. If the test succeeds, your account is connected.

Your key is stored encrypted. It cannot be read back in plain text afterwards — not by us either.

Step 3: assign scales to hive stands

After connecting you see your apiaries and their hive stands. At every stand that has a scale, tap Connect and pick the matching scale from the list.

The assignment belongs to the hive stand, not to the colony currently sitting there. That is deliberate: if a colony is lost and you put a new one in the same spot, it takes over the scale automatically. You do not have to reassign anything.

Scales already assigned to another hive stand no longer appear in the selection.

Step 4: check the field mapping

Under Field mapping you decide once which custom field the weight is written into. You can pick an existing custom field or create a new one right there. The setting applies to all assigned scales.

How often the sync runs

Under Sync settings you choose how often bee-pilot.io checks with Honeylink:

• Hourly — the most current values, the right choice for most accounts
• Every 2 hours — a good middle ground
• Daily — enough if a daily overview is all you need

Sync now triggers a sync immediately, without waiting for the next scheduled run.

Checking what happened

The Sync log shows every retrieval attempt from the last 30 days — when it ran, whether it succeeded and which values were taken over per scale. If a curve has a gap, you will find the explanation here: usually an expired access key, or a scale that reported nothing at that moment.

Disconnecting

Via Disconnect you either release a single scale from its hive stand or the entire Honeylink connection. Your access key is deleted in the process and no further values are retrieved. The readings already taken over remain in bee-pilot.io.

If something does not work

The connection test fails. Almost always the key is missing one of the two permissions from step 1, or it has since been revoked in the Honeylink portal. Create a new one and enter it again.

A scale is missing from the selection. It is already assigned to another hive stand — release it there first.

No new values are arriving. Check the sync log. If the sync fails there, the access key has usually expired.