A visit record is worth keeping only if it can be written in
under a minute at the hive. Everything below fits on one line.
The one-line record
Date · Hive · Queen · Brood · Stores · Space · Action
Example: 14 May · H3 · eggs seen · 6 frames · light · added super · none
That is the whole system. A notebook in the truck beats a spreadsheet you
update in theory.
What each field is for
Queen
Record what you SAW, not what you concluded.
"Eggs seen" is evidence. "Queenright" is an inference, and in a
month you will not remember which it was. Eggs mean a laying queen within about
three days, which is the fact you want back later.
Brood
Frames of brood, as a number.
A number compares across visits and across hives. "Good" does not.
This is the field that tells you which colonies carried the yard.
Stores
Heavy, adequate or light.
Three words is enough resolution to decide about feeding, and more
precision than that will not get written down.
Space
Whether they have room to expand, and whether you gave them any.
Congestion is the input to swarming. A run of "no room" entries in
April explains the swarm in May.
Action
Anything you did, plus anything you must come back for.
The return item is the valuable half. "Check queen cells next
visit" is the note that saves a colony.
Kept separately, because they are referred to differently
Treatments: product, dose, date, which colonies. Kept as its
own list, because you read it by colony over years rather than by visit.
Mite counts: number, date, method. A single count means little;
the series means everything.
Harvest: pounds per hive per pull, and the moisture reading of
the batch.
How often
Every visit, even the ones where nothing happened. A gap in the record reads
identically to a visit where all was well, and those are different things when you
are working out when a queen failed.
Photograph the page afterwards. Thirty seconds, and it survives the notebook
getting rained on.
References
University of Georgia Extension.
Honey Bees and Beekeeping (B1045).
extension.uga.edu 