> If a Business Plan ignores that some hives / equipment will always be
taken up by unproductive hives,  planning  will be on a false basis.

Agree.  Ignore those hives and you are ignoring the fact that part of your
investment is yielding no return; worse than that, the equipment is
depreciating in value, so is losing you money.

>It does depend of course whether the data is produced to improve business
planning within the industry / hobby...
 
If the data are honest, i.e. they do not conveniently discount some colonies
designated as 'non-production', then surely this is a most useful measure.
I think Jim once said that you cannot control that which you cannot measure
(or words to that effect).  I choose to use total crop divided by the number
of colonies fed the previous autumn because I see those colonies as my
investment for the following year, so the figure that I obtain is a simple
return on investment.  When it comes to choosing breeder queens, my Stud
Book will show me where and why colonies headed by a certain queens have had
their crop affected by things like splits or nucs being taken from them.  I
can then make a judgement from that data.
I also score queens on productivity against the apiary average; this enables
me to compensate for variations in forage available and weather conditions
at different apiary locations.

>... or just to show how wonderful  a particular beekeeper is.

I produce data just for my own purposes.  I am happy to share it, good or
bad, and also happy to share my mistakes.  Of course, I like to compare my
results with other beekeeping operations as this tells me how well (or not)
I am doing.  If another local beekeeper is doing better then I want to know
why and how, because I want to learn from that beekeeper.

Best wishes
 
Peter
52°14'44.44"N, 1°50'35"W

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