How heavy should a hive be for winter?
A scale reads the whole hive: boxes, frames, bees and honey. Honey is what the colony lives on in winter, so the empty hive and the bees have to come off first. Enter your reading and the weight of your equipment to get the honey estimate.
Two ways to weigh
Lifting the back edge by hand only moves about half the hive, because the front still rests on the stand. A luggage scale hooked under one side gives half the weight, so the calculator doubles it. A hive can weigh 150 lb or more, so a scale on one side is safer on the back than a whole-hive lift.
The Apiarist weighed dummy hives side by side and found that adding both sides read about 8% under the true weight. Repeated readings of one side varied by 0.3 to 1.7%. Use the same lift height every time, and watch how one hive changes over the weeks as well as where it sits against the target. He also puts a colony's use of stores at about 1 kg (2.2 lb) a week in maintenance mode. Once you know the honey, see how long it should last.
Where the weights come from
| Number | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Empty two-deep Langstroth | about 80 lb | Beekeep Club |
| Empty three-medium Langstroth | about 60 lb | Beekeep Club |
| Bees, hive furniture and honey, two deeps | ideally about 160 lb | Cornell CALS |
| One full deep box with bees and honey | about 90–100 lb | Cornell CALS |
| Bees in a fall colony | 5 lb (2.3 kg) | My estimate, no source: 20,000–30,000 bees at about 0.1 g each |
- Beekeep Club does not say what its empty weights include (floor, roof, frames, drawn comb), and a hive with drawn comb is heavier than one with foundation. The best empty weight is your own: weigh the same boxes, floor and roof on a scale before bees go in, or in spring after a hive dies out and is cleaned.
- Cornell's 160 lb is a total, so it matches a reading on your scale directly. With 80 lb of honey as its minimum, it leaves about 80 lb for boxes, frames and bees.
- For an 8-frame box or a different make I found no figure, so type your own empty weight.
- UF/IFAS describes the hefting version: lift the back of the bottom box. If it is hard to rock forward, the hive likely has enough food. A scale turns that feel into a number you can compare from week to week.