Traffic Lights Hive Status

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to talk about how we keep hive records without using a pen. So you might have seen this video done by other people where they use bricks that they put on top of the hive using a traffic light system. It's a great method, I'm a real kind of advocate of doing things lean. I've kind of got a bit of a Lean Six Sigma background myself, so I'm always looking at ways of kind of improving my beekeeping methods and procedures and making them as slick as they possibly can be. So you'll see the kind of way I move things around the honey room to try and make things as efficient as possible. I apply that all the way across my beekeeping practices. So this is something that I've developed. I know other people have developed very, very similar ideas. But it's kind of the, the whole philosophy of lean is very, very small incremental changes. So it's not a case of rewriting the books completely, reinventing the wheel just for the sake of it. But if you can gain a very, very small efficiency by not applying that much money to a situation, and you do that over and over and over again, you ultimately end up at a point where you've got a really, really good process that's Slick and effective. So you'll see from other people's videos they use a brick. So kind of rewind a little bit, what people would use is a pen and paper, and that's how most people kind of do their hive inspections, and they'll write down all of the information on there. Now that's a really, really good habit to get into. You see apps being developed at the moment for that as well, but I find kind of when I'm out in the field, it's difficult and slow to write all of these things down on paper. So I wanted a kind of quick way of identifying a hive status. They didn't slow me down during the inspections. So you'll see with the bricks, people paint the side of the bricks and you have a red, a green, an amber, however many sides of the brick that you want, and then the way that they're placed or orientated, wherever colour is up is the status of the beehive. So I've taken that idea and I've developed it one step further, and you don't really get kind of any additional benefit by doing it my way, Other than you're not limited to six faces of a brick, so you can actually have more using my method. You can kind of have up to like twelve different statuses, but I think that's overcomplicating it. So I only actually have four main statuses on my hive inspections. So you might have spied it already. What I've done here is I've created using a nuke wheel a traffic light system. So you've got green, red, yellow. And orange. Now you might ask, why have I done this over bricks? There's no additional functionality from using that wheel than there is for bricks, and the reason is, is that I don't use bricks on my hives. So where other people would have had bricks already in place and they could just paint the bricks, I use straps on all my poly hives, so I don't have the requirement to go and put the bricks on. So if I was going to use that method, I would I would have had to go out and buy some bricks. So I didn't want to buy 150 bricks. I thought it'd be a lot cheaper to buy 150 nuke wheels and come up with this method. So there's no additional functionality on it, it's just a case of if you don't have the bricks and you want to use the wheels instead, then this is a good method to use. And it also gives you the ability to kind of have more, more statuses because it's just however many you can fit around the wheel. So my 4 statuses are Green means everything's okay. The colony, there's no disease, it's building up well, it's increasing, there's no swarm cells, nothing to worry about. Green is good, and we want all of our hives to be on green. So that's green. Then we have red, and red is the worst indication that you can possibly have for For me, red means disease. I found disease. Now, I use red for all the diseases that I could find, whether it's any foulbrood. Never had any foulbrood, so never needed to use it for that. But ranging from kind of foulbrood all the way through to chalkbrood, any disease is red. And that means that I know that when I go back to that hive, I need to kind of follow hygienic procedures, and I need to go back and look and see if what I've done has resolved the issue. So for example, if I found some chalkbrood, I might I might requeen, I might clear out the floor, I might improve ventilation. I would have done a kind of proactive action to remove that disease, and then the next time I go back, I know to be prepared, hygienic, and I'm checking for a change. So red means disease. For me, yellow means requeening. So they kind of tend to be in this stage quite a lot with mine. So if I've added a cell, If they were swarming and I've done a swarm manipulation, basically any instance where there is no queen. Yeah, so that can be there's no queen, or there is the beginnings of a cell, or there is a virgin running loose within the colony. So all yellow means is don't touch it, and I give myself a timer for that. So it kind of, whether it's kind of 2 or 3 weeks depending on the stage that the cells are in. I give myself that reminder so I know not to go back to that hive, especially during the day, to disturb any mating flights or anything like that. So yellow for me means requeening. So I use orange as a variable status. So when I first designed this, I thought, well, I'll have 12 different statuses and I'll have one for every single kind of scenario. So I'll have 4 or 5 different swarm colours, I'll have a feeding colour, I'll have all of these different colours, and then I thought, I'm making this too complicated, it needs to be simple. So I've got my 4 main statuses, and orange is a variable status, and I rarely use orange, but what I'll do with orange is that if there's something going on, for example, I'm checking to see whether colonies need feeding, then I'll go and check all of my colonies and I'll use orange as a feeding status. As a one-off. So I'll kind of go around, I'll check them all, I can put it to orange, and then I can come back later on in the day or the next day and feed them all. So I use it as a bit of a variable one, and I find that's a really, really useful kind of way of dealing with it as opposed to limiting yourself to the colours. I use orange as a variable status, and I know something needs to be done or something is up, and I'll just keep a note for what that is for that specific day or week or month or whatever it is. So I've got 4 stages. Very, very simple. Green means everything's okay, red there's something wrong, there's a disease, yellow means they're requeening, any form of requeening, and orange something else. And I'll keep that variable status and keep a note of it. So that's it, just wanted to kind of let you know how I manage hive inspections and records without a pen. That's my method for doing it, very, very similar to the bricks. I think the bricks are a great idea, so if you've got bricks And you use bricks to weigh down your hives, you don't need this method. Completely useless to you. It's more work than it's worth. Just paint the bricks. If you don't use bricks and you want a kind of really, really simple, cheap method to do that, then this is a good method for you. A number of my other hives, they use a little 8 centimeter mini nuc wheel. I can get them for about 10p each, so they're a lot cheaper than bricks, and they're really, really quick to use. So that's it. Quick method, quick video. Trying to keep the kind of length of the videos down going forward. So I hope you've enjoyed this one. Please subscribe to the channel, please hit the bell so you get a notification, and I'll see you next time.