Weigh what came off each hive, not what came off the truck
A season total tells you whether it was a good year. A per-hive figure tells you which colonies earned their keep, and which have been carried by the others.
At the end of extraction there is one number everybody has: the total. It is the number you tell other beekeepers, and it is the number that decides whether it was a good year. It is also almost useless for deciding anything.
The average hides the spread
Thirty hives and six hundred kilos is twenty kilos a hive. It is also, more often, five hives at forty, twenty at eighteen, and five at nothing at all. Those three groups need three different decisions — split the strong ones, leave the middle alone, requeen or combine the rest — and the average recommends none of them.
The spread is the useful part, and it only exists if the harvest was recorded per hive.
A minute at the extractor
Recording per hive costs one thing: naming the hive a super came off before it goes into the extractor. Everything after that is arithmetic the app does — yield by hive, by apiary and by season, set against what each hive cost you in feed and treatment.
The reason it usually does not happen is that an extraction room is the worst place in beekeeping to be holding a phone. That is what the voice recording is for.
Common questions
Do I have to weigh every frame?
No. A super at a time is enough to separate the strong colonies from the weak ones, and that is the decision the figure has to support.
What if supers get mixed up during extraction?
Then record at the level you are confident about — per apiary rather than per hive. A figure you trust for a whole site is worth more than a per-hive figure you had to guess at.
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