> 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 *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html