I make notes. I’m sure you do to. How much is a good question. I made more notes as a beginner and quite some years after that. When I got well above hundred hives I began to question each kind of note and how much I could benefit from it. I wanted to save time, if I found it possible to skip doing some kind of notes.
For each year I use a fork binder. First I have a graph paper. On a horizontal line high up all the apiaries are numbered. On a vertical line to the left I make a note of the date, then an X for the apiary I have gone through that day. That’s the most important note, to be sure I don’t forget any apiary and to make sure it doesn’t take too long between my visits.
A spread in my fork binder.
I have made a map in the computer in the Excel application showing each apiary. On the spread is the map to the left. On the opposite side a blank graph paper for making notes. In the very early season (still winter/spring) I make note of the colony strength, how many “comb gaps” the bees occupy. Then of the progress of the colony (putting on boxes). At the end of the season, very late autumn/winter, again how many comb gaps the bees occupy.
I only make a thorough check of a colony if it doesn’t develop as expected. I check for eventual disease, if it has brood (thus a laying queen), and eventual other things to observe. I make notes only of things that depart from the average or the normal. No notes for a colony indicates an average or a normally functioning colony. Also notes are made concerning hot temper, no brood, wingless bees. I make notes of how much thymol in grams a colony get and what date, estimated amount of honey taken in kilograms (it doesn’t matter if I do a wrong estimation with 10-20%, the estimation is for comparison between the colonies).
When the season is over I compile the notes and do stats. Then I make a first probable selection concerning next year’s breeders and which queens I will shift next year. The final selections are made during May and June the coming season. Here the notes are invaluable as I tend to forget some colonies that I discover again when I’ve done the stats.
Before May comes there’s often a hard winter ahead, and a tough spring. And the spring this year was really tough, which changed the preliminary plans a lot. But the winter had been mild.
The spring was very rainy and very chilly. May was the coldest since 1962 in Sweden. The bees had small opportunities to get enough of fresh pollen for their usually quick buildup. And proteins they need desperately for everything for their rapidly expanding colony to function properly.
My bees have a higher varroa pressure than most others maybe, to let the least good colonies reveal themselves. Due to the season the immune system (rather defense system as their defense against diseases are different compared to mammals) among other things didn’t work fully due to lack of proteins. Viruses showed up even if the varroa population wasn’t big.
Maybe I should have stayed cool and not used varroa treatment, I don’t know. Varroa treatment affect the bees negatively as well, but of course not as much as mites. When should I stop treating altogether? And how should I do it? Just stop at any moment or do it in a certain way? I don’t know.
I have used more thymol this season than last. The colonies with high VSH value (VSH 80% the best one, included) and their daughters, most of them, showed wingless bees and many dwindled. I was surprised and disappointed. How was this possible? Can high VSH-value mean less good other traits than VSH? Sometimes such phenomena can appear with strong selection for strengthening a trait, as such selection often is made with the help of inbreeding.
Anyway, when I should decide which queens to breed from I went through the notes and found some interesting colonies I hadn’t payed enough attention to. Those colonies hadn’t needed any treatment for two years. So I made a VSH test. The S241 colony had three mites of 103 pupae checked. Two of the mites had no offspring. The third had one white daughter mite and no male. The H101 had one mite of 110 pupae checked, with no offspring. The neighbor colonies of these two colonies had wingless bees and many were dwindling. Of course I bred from these two good colonies.
Quite soon afterwards the H101 showed a wingless bee. I had split that colony and put the big split with the queen in the same apiary as the “mother” colony. The split with the queen lost most of its field bees that way. Was that a cause?
The S241-split was moved to the home apiary and kept its field bees. The split grew fine and is now a big colony. All the daughters are doing fine and building fine colonies. Both S241 and H101 are colonies that have shifted their queens themselves, whatever impact that may have.
To sum it up. I had to change my breeding plans quite a bit for this year, after this unusually cold and rainy spring. But I think it’s important to make good notes and from them plan for next season. Then when next season comes you know what to change and how.
The VSH 80%-colony was a disappointment and I don’t understand that, yet. There are though a couple of daughters from it that are very interesting. Those havn’t needed any treatment and didn’t show any wingless bees. One has shifted it’s queen. The second are showing a lot of bald brood and spotty brood (cleaned out brood with mites?). The queen is laying well. It seems it’s fighting reinvasion of mites and doing it well. So good that the colony hasn’t grown and hasn’t given any honey.
One of the daughter colonies to the VSH 80-colony is fighting hard against the mites and havn’t shown any wingless bees, not yet anyway. Maybe a breeder next year.
This season is a disaster. The month of July has been the rainiest I have experienced ever. The honey crop is in average maybe 5-10 kg per hive (including winter losses and failing colonies) to compare with 25-35 kg for several years. And many colonies may need a good sugar feed to survive the coming winter.
But, the season isn’t completely over yet…