Keeping Tabs On What's Going On In Your Beehives

Postman came to the door the other day with a package. Get loads of packages, and this one was a completely random package sent to me by stockcart.de. So it means it come from Germany. Now the UK supplier subsequently contacted me and said, "I've sent you up a few of these. Just see what you think of them. If you like them, can maybe send you some more." And I just thought there's such a cool idea. So I got sent these for free. I'm not paid to say anything. I can say what I want. There is one major thing that I'm not actually that keen on about this. I'll keep that to the end. But there's loads of really cool things that I am keen on. So first of all, what is it? It's some sort of kind of really rock-solid foam board that you can use in order to assess your colonies. Now I've just done a video going through every single colony up here and rating them out of 10, just randomly giving them 1 to 10 ratings based upon nothing really, just kind of my mind. Now what this card here would give me is a much better way to assess those colonies. Now the video that I did was a little bit of fun. I was just going through, I was taking the Apivar strips out, I was strapping them down for winter, And I thought, you know, I'll just rate them, give them a rating out of 10. Some were 0 because they were drone layers. Some of them looked particularly good, but there was no real method to my form of assessment there. Whereas this card here gives you a really good method for assessing what's going on in your colony. So let me chuck out some of these pins here and let's take a look at some of the different things that you can assess. So first up, you give yourself a hive number. So it can be— I like the way they've done this here. So you can have like hive number 1. Or that would be hive number kind of 13. And then, you know, if I had like 137, I could have it like that. So that would say obviously your singles, your tens, and your hundreds. So you'd have 1, 3, 7. Nice way of identifying the different numbers and very, very easy to change. Worth noting at this point as well, like, it's solid. Getting the pins in, it's not, it's not difficult, but it's not easy. Like, that is super, super solid and is not going anywhere. Look. Like once they're in, they're in. So then what else can you look at here? So strength, this was one of the things that I was looking at before. So some of them were very, very good up here, and then some of them were just good. So I'd kind of like be straddling between the 3 and the 4 there. And then obviously if your bees have absconded or they're drone layers and they're not there, absent to low. But let's, let's stay positive. Okay, so let's go with very good. Steadiness on comb, something that I'm always looking at when we're assessing the offspring of our breeder queens. So Something that I really look for all the time is 4. Like, you pick them up and they're not like running all over the place. They're super, super slow moving. Love that. Defensive behavior, again, something that I'm always looking for. Are they flying up? Are they stinging me? We kind of like straddled between the 3 and the 4 there. Didn't have any that were moderate. Maybe had 1 or 2 that were kind of in the middle like that. And I like that you can, you can make that decision. So you can kind of have 1, 2, 3, or 4. But you effectively can have like 2.5 and 3.5 as well by sticking them in the middle. But like I said, let's stay positive, go up here. And then the amount of feed, I'm guessing what that's saying is like, do they have enough feed to last them? So a lot of mine were a 4 and a lot of them were kind of like a 3. And again, maybe had a couple that were like 2.5. So that would be like a really useful way of assessing the colonies, and I could put that on each hive. The idea with these is that you stick One on each hive or a fixed one to each hive and that they just live on the hive indefinitely. They are weatherproof. They're never going to kind of come away or anything. They're pretty much rock solid. I do like them, I have to say. But then what you also have is in the season, you have the ability to kind of like look at what's going on for your colony, for your inspections. And what I always say with keeping records is you only need to keep the very limited amount of records. You don't need to keep tons and tons of records. Just keep the records that are important. So here we go. Did I see eggs? Yes, I saw eggs. Did I see uncapped brood? Yes, I saw uncapped brood. Did I see capped brood? No, let's say no, I didn't see any capped brood. Was there a supersedure cell? Yes, let's say there was a supersedure cell. Not good news. But there were no swarm cells because there was only one of them and it was in the middle of a frame. Not that that actually matters, all to do with the number. Coming back to a colony and seeing something like that, you'd be like, okay, right, we had, we had eggs. We had uncapped brood, we had a supersedure cell, right? Let me go and see what's happened to that supersedure cell. I love that. It just gives you like a real nice snapshot of what's going on. So you might have had a yellow queen, but then she superseded. So nope, got no supersedure cells anymore, and it's the next year, so let's have a blue queen, for example. So you can change things around, or it might be a case that there's no queen in there, and you stick it in there and say, right, there's no queen whatsoever. You also have the ability to give you some indication on how much you're feeding. So you could say I've fed 15 kilograms, and we can say, I took 40 frames of honey from that colony last year. That is really, really cool. I absolutely love that. And what's so nice about that is, okay, you imagine that's taken me like 5 minutes to populate, but let's go and do that again next week. Okay, strength, yeah, it was still 4 out of 4. Steadiness on comb, okay, they've ducked down one. Defensive behavior, still very good. Amount of feed, didn't have to feed them this time, so let's just stick them up there. I've seen eggs, I've seen uncapped brood, I've seen capped brood, no supersedure cells, no swarm cells, and I marked my queen and she's green. Done. Like, how quick was that? That is how quick you're gonna be. And you can just keep kind of all your spare ones, ones that you don't need over here if you're not using them. And that's it. It's a really, really nice, cool system. Now, a couple of the things that I don't like about this system is one is that it is completely dynamic. It doesn't give you any ability to look back. Not that I particularly need that, but that's one of the things that could potentially be better. The other thing that I'm just, I might be missing this here. I'm not 100% sure how it works, but there's just nothing on the back. How do I fix it on? So what I'll probably do with mine is I'll just leave them on top like that. Make sure that those pins are put in properly. You can get them right in, like, if you, if you go for it. I just kind of lent those 2 in. Um, I'll probably get mine and put it under like a rock or something like that and keep it. I've got a few of these, got about 7 or 8 of them. I really like it though. I think it's a really nice neat system. What I would like to do is I would like to, on mine, develop like a system where I can kind of stick it. But then I'm thinking, actually, already sticking it down there, how am I gonna— I don't want to have to do that down there. I maybe want to take that up and put it on here. Needs to be a nice working height. So I'll keep that one. I'll think about that over the winter. How is best place to manage these? Maybe, you know what, maybe the best idea is just to strap them under. There we go. That's what I'm going to do with mine. Oh, I see a problem with this though. You can't see what you're doing on that side. That's a bit annoying. So there's my idea for an improvement. Just have some empty space there where I can kind of ratchet strap it down, and then that's not going anywhere, and I've got a clear snapshot of what's going on with the colony. I love this.