What to write down and why

Write down the things you will otherwise reconstruct from memory in a year, badly, while deciding something expensive.

The four records that earn their keep

Treatments. What you applied, to which colonies, on what date, at what dose. This is the record that matters most and the one most often kept in someone's head. Resistance management depends on knowing what you used last time, and several treatments have honey-supers-off restrictions that you have to be able to prove to yourself.

Mite counts. The number, the date, the method. A single count tells you almost nothing. A run of counts tells you whether what you did worked, which is the only way treatment decisions ever improve.

Harvest. Pounds per hive, per pull, and the moisture reading of the batch. Per-hive is the point: totals hide the fact that four colonies carried the yard.

Money. Every input, including the ones that feel like they do not count. Fuel, jars, sugar, replacement frames, the extractor you amortize over five years.

Per-hive, not per-yard

Averages conceal exactly the information you need. A yard that produced sixty pounds a hive might be twelve even colonies or six excellent ones carrying six that should have been combined. Those are different problems with different answers, and the yard total cannot tell them apart.

This is the argument for permanent hive identification. Numbered stands or painted lids cost nothing and turn a pile of observations into a history.

Records you are required to keep

Requirements vary by state and by what you sell. Registration of colonies is required in many states, often per location and renewed annually. Selling under a cottage food provision usually carries its own conditions, which may include labeling, sales channel limits and sometimes a sales cap you have to be able to demonstrate.

Find out what your state requires before you need to produce it, and keep those records separately from your working notes. The inspector's copy and your notebook serve different purposes and the notebook is not a substitute.

Keep it findable in February

The best system is the one still being used in year three. A notebook that lives in the truck beats a spreadsheet that gets updated in theory. What matters is that each entry carries a date, a hive identity and a number, and that you can find last August from a chair in February.

Photograph the notebook page after each visit if nothing else. It is thirty seconds and it survives the notebook getting rained on, which it will.

References