Everything carries a date, and that is the feature
A record without a date is an anecdote. Almost everything the app does later, trends, treatment courses, withdrawal periods, cost per kilo, and the records an inspector may ask for, rests on the dullest field on the screen.
The least interesting field in the whole application is the date. It fills itself in, nobody edits it, and no one has ever asked for it. It is also the field everything else is built on.
A reading is nothing on its own
One inspection tells you the state of a colony on one morning. It cannot tell you whether the population is climbing or falling, whether the mite count is worse than last month, or whether a treatment did anything at all. Those are comparisons, and a comparison needs two dated points.
It is also why the app records before it assesses. The judgement comes later, out of the series. A colony at five frames of bees is neither strong nor weak until you know it was at eight three weeks ago.
What the dates make possible
The trend detectors read a hive's inspection history in order and look for shapes: a population declining across three visits, brood disrupted out of season, a treatment that never moved the mite count. Every one of them is arithmetic over dated records, and every one of them is a diagnosis written for the beekeeper the moment the new row lands.
The same is true of the smaller things. A treatment course knows its third dose falls on day fourteen, and it knows how many days remain of the withdrawal period before the supers can go back on. A queen recorded as queen twenty twenty-four is two years old in every inspection from then on without anyone doing the subtraction. A season of costs divided by a season of harvest is a cost per kilo, and a season is a range of dates. None of it is clever, and all of it needs the date to be right, which is why it is filled in for you rather than typed.
The records someone else may ask for
Bees are food-producing animals, and in the UK and across the EU the law treats a varroa treatment as a veterinary medicine given to livestock: what was given, how much, to which colonies, on what date, and when the withdrawal period ended, kept for years. Elsewhere the rules vary, but a dated treatment record is what every inspector, every honey buyer with a residue question, and every future version of you will want to see. A record that was generated by a to-do list on the day the dose was due is a record that already exists, in the format they want.
The same is true of disease. American and European foulbrood are notifiable in many countries, and the question after a finding is always the same: when did you last look, and what did you see? A dated row per visit with the disease readings on it is the answer.
Why the date is not typed
A record with the wrong date is worse than no record, because it enters the arithmetic with confidence. So the app fills the date in from the moment the inspection was spoken, and lets you correct it to when the work actually happened if you are entering it later. The one thing it will not do is leave it blank. That dull field is the difference between a stack of impressions and a season you can read.
It is also the reason a notebook, a spreadsheet and an app are not the same tool. Which one to keep records in is mostly a question of what happens to the date after you write it down.
Common questions
Can I record an inspection I did yesterday?
Yes. The date can be set to when the work actually happened: what is stored is the date of the inspection, not the date you got round to entering it. Inspections recorded by voice in the field carry the moment they were spoken.
How long should beekeeping records be kept?
For treatments, as long as the law where you keep bees says: in the UK, records of veterinary medicines given to food-producing animals, which includes bees, must be kept for five years, and EU rules are similar. For everything else, as long as they are useful, which in practice means for the life of the hive, because a queen's age, a site's history and a colony's habit of swarming are all things you want to see across years.
What records does a bee inspector want to see?
Which hives you have and where, what you treated them with and when, and what you found when you looked. A dated inspection row per visit with the disease readings on it, and a dated treatment record per course, answers all three without a search through a drawer.
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