Hive inspection notes are like taking good notes on the condition of your hives on each visit. These notes are invaluable because they form a record of the health of your hive or apiary. When something goes wrong with your bees, your notes may help you identify what’s going on.
Let’s say you have a colony that is staring to go downhill, lack of brood, lots of drones…
You check your inspection log and find that this pattern started after you re-queened 2 months ago. Looks like you got a poorly mated queen!
If you are a beginner beekeeper, you might not be able to diagnose this kind of thing in your hive when you start off, but if you write down what you are seeing, you can show it to a mentor on the forum who can. More experienced beekeepers will benefit from keeping a log because notes can also help you identify positive patterns as well. Let’s say you are reviewing your notes from the previous couple of years of beekeeping and you notice that the hive that had a top entrance in spring produced more honey than the hives that didn’t. It could just be that the hive with the top entrance was a stronger hive, but you might want to add extra entrances to your other hives and find out if your honey production on those hives will increase, too.
So whether you want history to repeat itself or not, a record of your beekeeping history will come in handy! You can even take the forum with you on your phone and fill it in on site!
Simply start a topic, you will notice the topic template is pre filled in, just make the title something relevant and searchable so you can get back to it, like
Grant's hive log 16th Jan 21 or Grant's hive journal 6th March or Grant's hive logbook 15th Feb 21 that way it gives you a sense of time and identity.
Let’s say you have a colony that is staring to go downhill, lack of brood, lots of drones…
You check your inspection log and find that this pattern started after you re-queened 2 months ago. Looks like you got a poorly mated queen!
If you are a beginner beekeeper, you might not be able to diagnose this kind of thing in your hive when you start off, but if you write down what you are seeing, you can show it to a mentor on the forum who can. More experienced beekeepers will benefit from keeping a log because notes can also help you identify positive patterns as well. Let’s say you are reviewing your notes from the previous couple of years of beekeeping and you notice that the hive that had a top entrance in spring produced more honey than the hives that didn’t. It could just be that the hive with the top entrance was a stronger hive, but you might want to add extra entrances to your other hives and find out if your honey production on those hives will increase, too.
So whether you want history to repeat itself or not, a record of your beekeeping history will come in handy! You can even take the forum with you on your phone and fill it in on site!
Simply start a topic, you will notice the topic template is pre filled in, just make the title something relevant and searchable so you can get back to it, like
Grant's hive log 16th Jan 21 or Grant's hive journal 6th March or Grant's hive logbook 15th Feb 21 that way it gives you a sense of time and identity.