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, which were carried by the others, and what to do with each group. It costs one minute at the extractor.
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, and the average recommends none of them:
- The five at forty are the colonies to breed from and to split next spring. They are also the ones most likely to swarm, so they want space earliest.
- The twenty at eighteen are the apiary. Leave them alone and manage them as normal.
- The five at nothing are the question. Some were new colonies or splits and did what they should; the rest had a queen problem, a disease, or a mite load, and the inspection rows from June will say which. Requeen or combine them before winter rather than feeding them through it.
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. Mark the box as it comes off the hive, put it on the scale, say the hive and the weight. 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. Hands are sticky, the extractor is loud, and the frames keep coming. That is what the voice recording is for: the phone stays on the shelf, and the record is made as the super is weighed.
When supers get mixed up
They will, sometimes. A stack of supers from one apiary that lost their labels on the drive home is still a per-apiary figure, and a per-apiary figure you trust is worth more than a per-hive figure you had to guess at. Record at the level you are sure about. The app takes a harvest per hive or per apiary, and the site comparison works at either.
Harvest is a date as well as a weight
Twenty kilos in June and twenty kilos in September are different facts. The first is a spring flow the colony converted quickly; the second may be the whole year's work. Recording the date with the weight lets the season's chart show when each apiary produced, which is the beginning of knowing what forage it actually has, and it keeps the honey on the right side of any treatment's withdrawal period.
Weight, hive, date. Three things said out loud at the extractor, and the season total becomes thirty answers instead of one.
Common questions
How much honey does a hive produce in a year?
Far less consistently than the averages suggest. A typical temperate colony in a reasonable year gives somewhere between ten and thirty kilos of surplus, a strong colony on good forage can double that, and a weak one gives nothing. Regional averages exist, but the useful number is the spread inside your own apiary, because that is where the decisions are.
How do I keep track of which super came from which hive?
Mark it before it leaves the hive. A number on the box or a strip of tape on the top bar as you lift it off, and the hive named when the frames go into the extractor. In the app you say the hive and the kilos as the super is weighed, so nothing is written down and nothing is transcribed later.
When is honey ready to harvest?
When the bees say so. Frames at least three-quarters capped are the traditional rule; a refractometer reading of about eighteen per cent moisture or less is the reliable one, because honey above that can ferment in the jar. Harvest during or just after a flow, leave the colony its winter stores, and record the date, because the same frame count means something different in June and September.
Harvest and feeding records in BeehiveMind »
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