Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey keeps hive inspection records on laminated A3 sheets pinned inside the poly-hive roof. The sheets track queen generation, breed, disease status, and honey productivity, traveling with the hive so the history stays attached to the colony.
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to do a very, very quick video just showing you how I do my hive inspection records. So I've gone through so many different ways of doing hive inspection records. I've used apps, I've used kind of Excel spreadsheets, I've got books, I've got all sorts, and it's taken me a while to kind of settle on something that I'm happy with and that's easy to use. So I don't write stuff down on here every single time I visit, I only put stuff on here when I really, really need to. So the kind of stuff that I do, I've got an A3 sheet here and it's fully laminated, and then I just pin it with drawing pins onto the bottom of the polyhive and then that's secure. I've got details on the back as well, so I can kind of put it over to the other side and put the information on there as well. The key information that I want to keep though, and it's long-standing information for each hive, is the details about the colony, so about the queen, how well they overwinter, what generation the queen is, where I bought the queen from, the breed of the queen, kind of all the standard information that you'd get. I like to keep that information in the hive as opposed to having a number on the hive And some of these hives do have numbers on them, and then having to reference that back to a spreadsheet or a book or something that could easily get lost or damaged. I like to keep it kind of all within the hive. So yeah, so that's kind of pretty much what it is. I don't need to go into kind of any more detail. Really, really simple way of kind of keeping your records on your hives like that. Every time I go in, I don't bother even looking at that, but when I put new queens in the hives, I make sure I update all of the information in here just so I'm keeping a good record of what queens I'm using, how well they overwinter, if they're prolific, if they kind of give you a good honey crop, if there's any issues with disease. I mean, all the standard stuff that you'd kind of keep notes of, I keep that here on this sheet. And then all I do, I turn it over and I put it on the hive, and then whenever I need it, that information's there. And then the roof can travel with the queen. So So if the queen goes into a different hive, I put the roof with that hive and then I give it a different roof with a new sheet and we can start over again. So really, really quick video today, trying to get the kind of key information out, just showing you what I'm doing in the apiary today. So hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video. I'll see you next time.
