Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I'm starting my fourth year and have not lost a hive over winter yet but a lot of that has to do with me feeding every warm day through the winter because I'm always worried about starving bees. The bad side of my process is that I'm fighting swarms every year as early as March.

I've read articles about people bringing normal scales to the hives and weighing them or sitting the entire hive on a scale for the entire winter. I bought a spring loaded fish scale that has a hook you would put into the gills and hang the fish for weight and it will weigh up to 100 lbs. this will allow me to hook the back of the hive and slightly lift it to get somewhere near half of the hive weight. I plan on tracking weights over the next few years so that I can hone in on comfortable weights entering the winter. I can also then easily track hive weights through the winter and spring and over a few years hopefully find a happy ground even if the experment causes me to loose a few hives. My hope is that I can find a comfortable range in weight for different times of the winter that causes me less work and saves me feed money in the long run.

My questions are:
Does anyone else track hive weights other than just the arm tug?
If you have tracked weights and saved the data and conclusions would you be willing to share your information and put me or anyone else years ahead on collecting data?
Do you think I'm completely over engineering this?

I haven't done anything with hive scales. . . . yet. Do what you enjoy doing in trying to figure out how to keep bees alive. That's the fun of it all. My feeding method consists mostly of the purchase of a large chest freezer. I still have about 25-30 frames of extractable honey (having put about 30 frames of honey back on hives in October). I will check where the cluster is in my hives periodically when the temperature is above 50°F and sunny. If the cluster is still below the top super of honey, I will close things up. If the bees have eaten their way up to the opening of the inner cover, I will either move honey frames from the outside of the top super toward the cluster or I will add a medium super with 3-4 frames of honey above the cluster with the rest of the frames being open, drawn comb as fillers.