Measuring the weight of a beehive

I am on a research team doing exactly that: We have put several bee hives on load cells to log weight at intervals of 10 min, or even 2 min, for several months. The load cells are expensive (little creep and 20 g precision) and are not an option for you.

My main message is: You should not worry about creep! You are interested in the daily weight gain, so make sure to measure weight at least every midnight. Subtract subsequent midnight readings and you'll achieve accurate measurements of daily weight gain, despite any creep (the creep during 24h is neglible). Add all the daily gains and you have the total amount of honey produced.

Bonus info: If you pile you hives high, wind will catch them and disturb your readings. Second to second weight readings could change by 1 kg! Therefore, to obtain one good reading, obtain several readings (say, 30 readings at 30s interval) and compute one reading as the average of that. Maybe calculate standard deviation also to get a measure how precise your average is.

Beekeepers all over the world are on to this, mesuring bee hive weight, temperature, rel. humidity, CO2, sound and vibrations! What this avalanche of data all means, is still an open question, except daily weight gain (or loss), that's easy to interpret and put to use, right?

Good luck,
Niels, Aarhus University, Denmark.