Post 15 of 29 in the AZ Hive series
When you’re working six hives with twenty-four chambers and more than two hundred frames, you can’t trust your memory. There’s just too much going on. Pull a frame, put it in the freezer for storage, and months later you need to remember: brood frame or honey frame? So we mark.
The chalkboard convention. Each hive’s outer door is a chalkboard. We’ve settled on a small set of conventions that tell me everything I need to know before I open it up.
- Top-left corner: the number of chambers currently open to the bees.
- Running notes: anything from the last inspection — queen seen, nectar coming in, mites this week. We also log inspections on the PC, but the chalkboard catches the in-the-moment stuff that you want to see at a glance.
- Red magnet at the bottom: queen is red-marked.
Frame markings. The frames themselves get a small set of marks too:
- Year added. Helps me retire old frames on schedule.
- Foundation type. “P” for plastic, since that’s what most of mine are.
- Hive location. “B” for brood, “H” for honey — written when I first place the frame, updated if its use changes.
Three letters and a year. Not much, but enough to tell me at a glance whether a given frame is supposed to be in a brood chamber or a super, how old it is, and what’s under the wax. It also helps me keep the frame in its original orientation — markings face up and toward the back of the hive.
The whole point is the same as the AZ design itself: less time deciphering, more time beekeeping.
Next: Why Our Hives Have Names: The Scooby Doo Theme — the running motif you’ve been seeing hints of since the start.