Using bathroom scales to heft hive?

[itma]

Complicated?

Just turn it on, and you'll be fine ...

 

[Finman]

7lbs kg

What is this? A new unit of force?

yes. We call it point ******
.

 

[Luminos]

Language, Timothy...

 

[alanf]

Just turn it on, and you'll be fine ...

It is on Combination of light angle and cheap low contrast display with batteries fading. There are some downsides to 2 quid electronics, the upside is it's 2 quid.

 

[alanf]

Just out of interest. Roughly how much would a hive weigh with a good amount of stores and bees in?

Last winter going into November I had a hive I reckoned had 20Kg of stores by counting the sealed frames. Budget cedar national brood box, super of stores, empty super with polystyrene insulation, roof and mesh floor came in a nudge over 40Kg (20Kg a side). Without any additions or removals the same hive dipped under 30kg in February.

 

[Finman]

.
I have wintered 20 years bees in poly langstrots. Half are 2-box winterer and half one box.

I take almost all honey off. About 5-10 kg remain in hives. I feed 20 kg on average to hives.
They are nowadays 30hives = 600 kg sugar.

I feed them in September. In Spring I even stores between hives to get rid off winter sugars.
I need not feed them in Spring more.

When I had wooden non insulated hives, they used 50% more food.
Biggest advantage comes from faster spring build up when hives are warm.
Biggest consumption happens in Spring when they have brood.

My bees live with sugar from September to May.

.
My bees are happy. They are most happy when they fly after me stings pointing towards my neck.

.if some hive is not happy, I change the queen.

 

[alanf]

my post wasn't actually aimed at anyone or any other method, just a general observation and a link to two photos involving a method with bathroom scales -as per the title of the thread and the equipment which the op has available at this moment in time.

Not knocking it as a method and the link is appreciated. If it's fine for whatever purpose Michael Palmer has in mind, then it's good for him.

Searching for Michael Palmer's comments I saw another thread http://www.beesource.com/forums/showthread.php?260105-How-do-you-weight-your-hive To paraphrase a few postings: He weighs in September before opening the hive (so it's still propolised). He reckons that where he is the bees have stored all they can by then themselves and works out what he will feed in addition. That makes sense, he works to a target weight for each of his standard hives going into winter so an accurate weight for all hives before feeding is important.

I took the OPs original point to be a concern that repeated estimates by hefting didn't feel like they were giving consistent results. If I see enough stores going into winter then the corresponding weight is what I can measure and repeat. If the weight isn't perfectly accurate because of some tilt or position of the lift point, that doesn't matter as long as any error is consistent - it's the change when I re-weigh every few weeks that I'm looking for. Repeated weighing by tilting the whole hive on bathroom scales every few weeks is possible, but it's doing it the hard way.