Everything carries a date, and that is the feature
A record without a date is an anecdote. Almost everything the app does later — trends, reminders, cost per kilo — 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.
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.
The same is true of the smaller things. A treatment course knows its third dose falls on day fourteen. A season of costs divided by a season of harvest is a cost per kilo. 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.
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 typing it in.
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