Weighing your Hives
Before removing any boxes from the top of your hives in order to see if there is any brood in them or if there is only capped honey, the smart and easy thing to do is to weigh your hives. By weighing your hives you can determine if there is enough honey in the entire hive to even make harvesting feasible. Obviously, determining whether or not there is surplus honey in the hive without opening it is a whole lot easier on both you and your bees than the alternative (thorough inspection). By using the Hive Scale, you’ll easily be able to determine how much honey is in the hive, if and how much you may be able to harvest, and how much your bees will have for winter stores. This hive scale is the best thing we’ve seen added to the beekeeper’s tool chest in a long time and we believe that every beekeeper should have one. After you weigh a hive and determine that there is definitely enough honey in it to allow for a honey harvest, proceed by inspecting the top box for brood. Read Removing Boxes of Honey carefully before proceeding.