The other end of the hive does act as a pivot and if you were sharply tilting the hive as you weighed it, you might want to correct for the angle. But you're not lifting the end up very far at all and at small angles, the angular correction is trivial.*
More relevant is that you're only measuring half the weight. The other half is still being carried by the other end. So to get total hive weight, you have to take a measurement at the front AND at the back and add the two. (You can't just take one measurement and double it because you don't know the distribution of weight within the hive. If, for example, the honey is mostly toward one side, a single measurement would be falsely high or low depending on which side you measured.)
Even more, though, you probably don't care because absolute weight doesn't actually tell us much that's interesting. What we really want to watch for are trends. Is the weight increasing and how fast? Is it decreasing and do I know why?
So even if you're only measuring half the weight and don't have a clue whether you're measuring the heavy or the light end, as long as your measurement technique is consistent, you can get a good enough sense of the trend to make your management decisions.
Mike Rossander
* For the two people who care, the correction factor if the weight were all concentrated on the bottom board would be 1/cosine(theta). For 1 degree off horizontal, that would be a correction factor of 1.00015. For 10 degrees off horizontal, that's still only 1.015.
When the center of mass of the hive is at the bottom, the geometry gets a little more complicated. For a hive of width W with the center of mass at height H, the correction factor will be 1/(cosine(theta) - H/W sine(theta)). That will be larger but for small theta and H less than 5 supers high, still pretty trivial.
Disclaimer: It's late and I'm running low on caffeine so if you really, really care about the exact value, you should probably double-check my math.
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