Beekeeping records: notebook, spreadsheet or app

Beekeepers argue about hives and queens and treatments, and almost never about records, which is odd, because records are the only part of beekeeping that compounds. A good record of one season makes the next one easier; ten years of them make a beekeeper who knows their sites better than anyone alive. The question is not whether to keep them. It is where, and the answer depends less on the tool than on what happens to the row after you write it.

What to record

One row per hive per visit, with the same fields every time. These are the fourteen BeehiveMind records, and they make a good paper sheet too:

1. Date
2. Frames in the box
3. Frames of bees
4. Frames of pollen
5. Frames of honey
6. Frames of open brood
7. Frames of closed brood
8. Queen seen
9. Queen cells
10. Queen's year
11. Varroa
12. American foulbrood
13. European foulbrood
14. Nosema

Alongside the inspection rows, three short lists: every feed with the amount, every treatment with product, dose and date, and every harvest with kilos per hive. What each field means and what to look for is in the inspection checklist; why brood is two fields and not one is in what closed brood tells you.

What the law asks for

Bees are food-producing animals, and in the UK and across the EU every veterinary medicine given to them, which includes every varroa treatment, must be recorded: the product, the dose, the date, the colonies treated, and the withdrawal period, kept for five years in the UK. Many US states, Australian states and New Zealand require hive registration, and American and European foulbrood are notifiable almost everywhere. Inspection records are rarely required by law, and they are the first thing an inspector asks to see after a finding, because the question is always when you last looked and what you saw.

The notebook

A waterproof notebook and a pencil in the veil. It is honest, it works in gloves, it never runs out of battery, and it is where most beekeepers start. Its problem is what happens next: nothing. The rows are not comparable without copying them out, the treatment record for the inspector is somewhere in last year's book, and the question that records exist to answer, what is this colony doing compared with a month ago, means flipping pages at the hive with sticky fingers. Notebooks are where records go to be kept rather than used.

The spreadsheet

The spreadsheet is the notebook with arithmetic, and for a few hives it is genuinely good. One tab per hive, one row per visit, fourteen columns, and a chart of population over the season is a formula away. It is searchable, it is free, and it is where a lot of careful beekeepers stay for years.

It breaks in two places, and both arrive somewhere past twenty hives. The first is entry: nobody types into a spreadsheet at the apiary, so every row is transcribed in the evening from a notebook or from memory, and the transcription is the step that stops happening in June. The second is structure: the one-tab-per-hive layout that made it readable makes comparing across hives, or across apiaries, or across years, a job of copying ranges into a summary tab that is wrong by August because someone added a column. A treatment applied to twenty hives is twenty rows to type. The spreadsheet does not fail loudly; it just falls a few weeks behind and then stays there.

The app

An app earns its place by removing the entry step, not by drawing prettier charts. If the row is made at the hive, with the phone in a pocket and the readings spoken as you take them, there is nothing to transcribe and the record is complete on the day. That is the whole reason BeehiveMind records by voice: ten phrases, confirmed by a beep, without looking at the screen. Recognition runs offline because apiaries do.

The rest follows from the row existing. Every hive belongs to an apiary with coordinates, so the same records compare across sites without a summary tab. A treatment scheduled for an apiary is recorded against every hive in it. The platform reads each new inspection against the hive's history and writes a diagnosis when the shape changes. And the treatment record the inspector asks for is already a dated list, because it was the to-do list that told you the third dose was due.

The honest limits: a phone can be dropped in a super, wind defeats any microphone, and a system that lives on a server is a system you are trusting with your data. Export exists on every plan for that reason; the records are yours.

Which one

• Two to five hives and you like paper: a notebook, with the fourteen columns ruled in, and a photograph of each page at the end of the season so it is somewhere searchable.
• Up to about twenty hives and you enjoy a spreadsheet: keep it, but keep it honest, with one row per hive per visit entered within a day, and a separate treatments sheet with the dates the law wants.
• More than that, or any number of hives at more than one site, or a spreadsheet that is already three weeks behind: an app, and specifically one that records at the hive. The free plan of BeehiveMind covers one apiary and ten hives without a card, which is enough to find out whether it fits how you work.

Whatever you choose, the rule is the same and it is the only rule: write the row before you close the hive. Everything the record can do for you later depends on it having been written then.