And I thought we were high tech when we would go out and lift each side of our hives with a fishing scale to see what they weighed ! The one thing we really had to watch for was that they had enough going into winter and in the spring, that they didn't go empty (the Seattle area is notorious for 2-3 weeks of nice weather in April which gets them all cranked up, the queen laying then 2-3 weeks of cold/rain/snow). You could lose a hive easily in late spring when that happened (cold / rain was also typically when your new queens arrived in the mail with no way to put them in the hives 
)