Log book · complete
Hive notes
Every entry kept for this stand, newest at the top. The first one that survives being typed up is from 6 May 2024; the cards before that are in a box and mostly illegible.
- Health
- Mite counts, treatment windows and the August I missed
Counting what falls on a tray instead of guessing, the two windows that matter on this slope, and the year I treated three weeks too late.
- Wintering
- Winter losses: three colonies, and what the combs said
Five colonies went into one winter and two came out. Isolation starvation, a colony queenless since October, and a roof I had propped up wrong.
- Swarming
- Swarm season: the two weeks in May I cannot look away
Queen cells, the nine-day interval, a split that worked, and a cast that left over the hedge while I was standing in the wrong hive.
- Forage
- The forage year on this slope, from willow to ivy
Which plants actually feed these hives between February and October, where the gaps fall, and how a fortnight of rape changes an entire summer.
- Inspections
- What I look for in the first full inspection of April
The first proper look inside after winter: brood pattern, stores, whether the queen is laying, and how few frames that actually takes.
Entries are not edited once they are in. Where a later entry contradicts an earlier one, both stay and the later one says which it replaces — the reasoning is in the notes on how the log works.