Hive card done right: what belongs in each inspection

Why a hive card?

After the third inspection on a Saturday you are no longer sure in which colony you saw queen cells. After a winter you no longer remember which colony was so keen to sting in May. That is exactly what the hive card is for: it records, for each colony, what you saw and did at every inspection.

Decisions come out of it. You can tell which colony shows swarming mood and needs space, which has too little feed and which one over the years is gentle, calm on the comb and productive. Anyone who rears queens or makes nucs takes the colonies with the best entries for it.

The Bee Specialist Centre of the Bavarian State Institute for Viticulture and Horticulture states that records make it easier, even with a few colonies, to inspect the bees in a more targeted way and to prepare beekeeping interventions better, and that hive cards are usually used for documentation. The printable hive card of the State Institute has columns for date, combs covered with bees, brood, gentleness, calmness on the comb, behavior, swarm and removed queen cells, honey, feed, varroa, diseases and remarks.

Hive card and medicine record book are not the same

A hive card is voluntary. No law requires you to write down gentleness or brood pattern. It is different with veterinary medicines: anyone who treats their colonies, for example against the varroa mite, must keep a record of the medicines used under Article 108 of Regulation (EU) 2019/6 and keep the details available for inspections for at least five years. In Germany this record is called the medicine record book.

So do not enter treatments only as a note on the hive card, but with all required details: date, medicine, amount, treated colonies, supplier, proof of purchase, withdrawal period and duration of treatment, plus the batch. In iBeekeeper a treatment is a separate entry at the colony, separate from the inspection. Your treatments produce the Medicine record book (Germany) as a PDF, while the inspections stay on the hive card. In the Chronicle of the colony you see both on one timeline.

What belongs on the hive card

A few entries are enough for each inspection if you record them the same way each time:

• Date and weather: In cool, windy weather bees behave differently than on a warm afternoon.
• Queen: seen, eggs seen or not, marking color and year.
• Brood: number of brood combs and the brood pattern, solid or spotty.
• Colony strength: for example the number of occupied comb spaces.
• Feed: how much capped feed is present.
• Gentleness, calmness on the comb and swarming tendency: the classic traits for selection, best with scores on a fixed scale.
• Queen cells: whether there are queen cups, cells with eggs or capped cells.
• Varroa: the natural mite drop or the result of a powdered sugar or wash test, with date.
• Measures: honey super added, drone frame cut, nuc made, fed.
• Next step: what needs to be done on the next visit.

Set a fixed scale for ratings and stick to it. A score for gentleness only means something if you give it the same way every year and for every colony. Free text is good for special observations, but only fields with fixed values can be analyzed.

How often you make entries

Make an entry at every inspection, ideally directly at the colony. What you add from memory in the evening is less accurate and gets rarer over time. This pays off especially in swarming season, when you check for queen cells at short intervals: you see at a glance when you last visited a colony and what you found there.

Work without an inspection also belongs in the picture: feedings, treatments, harvests and changes of apiary. In iBeekeeper these are separate entries at the same colony, which you can create for several colonies in one step, for all at an apiary if you wish.

Varroa on the hive card

The varroa mite is one of the most important reasons for colony losses in winter. How heavily a colony is infested, you do not see by looking at the combs, only by measuring.

The Bee Specialist Centre of the State Institute recommends determining the infestation through debris diagnosis, that is, through the natural mite drop on a board under the colony, and states: “After the summer treatment, the treatment success should be checked with the same method.” A mite check after overwintering is also important, it says, to detect problem colonies early. Documenting all applications additionally in the hive card corresponds to good professional practice there (LWG, Varroa).

Enter every measured value with the date at the colony. That way you have a baseline before the treatment and can check after the treatment whether it worked. In iBeekeeper you create a varroa count for this: from the number of mites and the counting period, the app calculates the mite drop per day and shows it in the Varroa history together with the treatments. Our Varroa indicator also helps you assess the infestation.

Typical mistakes

• Too many fields: A card with thirty fields you will no longer fill in during summer. Start with a few and add what you are missing.
• Changing scales: If you rate gentleness once with scores and once with words, you cannot compare later.
• Only noting anomalies: “All in order” is information too. Without it you will not know later whether you looked at all.
• Treatments only as a note: For the medicine record book you need all required details. Enter treatments where they are recorded completely.
• Confusing colony and hive: The hive card belongs to the colony, not to the box. If you move a colony, its history moves with it.

How to set up the digital hive card in iBeekeeper

1. Choose a template: Start with a ready-made template or the template of another beekeeper instead of creating every field yourself.
2. Adapt the fields: Add your own fields for what you are missing, as a number, selection, yes/no, date or text, and leave out what you never enter. You do not need programming knowledge for this.
3. Create colony groups: You group nucs, production colonies or breeding colonies in colony groups, each group with its own form.
4. Define buttons: Which actions are available as buttons at the colony, you decide in the settings. If you wish, you can create the same hive card entry for several colonies at the same time.
5. Enter at the colony: In the Bienenvölker app you fill in the hive card directly at the apiary, even without a network. In the Frame grid you mark brood, honey, pollen and queen cells comb by comb, and the app calculates the brood area.
6. Analyze: At home you see the same entries in the web application, in the Chronicle of each colony on one timeline.

If you have kept your hive cards in a spreadsheet so far, you import them from CSV, XLS or XLSX files. With a package and during the trial period you speak your inspection, and iBee fills in the fields; you check every value before saving. What else the hive card can do is described on the page Digital hive card.

Related pages

• Beekeeping app iBeekeeper
• Digital hive card
• Medicine record book for beekeepers
• Beekeeping app: what to look for