> And in this day and ages why are you talking about pencils 
> and note pads and not an ipad or smart phone?

Given the jaw-droppingly low level of apiary record-keeping, even among this
erudite group, I guess I should explain. 

'Cause I was a pioneer in the field of beeyard automation, and used Palm
Pilots circa 1998-2001 in my operation, and they got dropped, kneeled on,
propolis-coated, left out in the rain overnight, left on the roof or hood of
a vehicle, and overheated to the point of melting the plastic, the carnage
was truly horrible.  I tried little dictation recorders, but they fared
little better.  So my teenage employees never even put a dent in any of the
fleet of Volvo wagons they drove and hauled hive trailers with, but the PDAs
dropped like flies, at about $100 each.

These days, a Bluetooth earpiece and a voice-to-text app on a cellphone
might do the job, but it is easier to sketch, and make notes and scribble on
genuine dead trees, and transcribe it back at the lab. I think a cellphone
and a GPS are great tool for anyone who places hives at night and needs to
mark the yard location, but I don't move many hives that often myself these
days.

And now, anyone can even buy the same little notebook that a guy over in NJ
started making on a small scale a few years ago, and I use exclusively, as
only hipsters use Moleskines, DayTimers are for dinosaurs, and
Trapper-Keepers are still for 12-year-olds: 
http://www.bookbinders.com/assets/images/full-honeycomb-decomposition-book-p
hoto.jpg
http://tinyurl.com/nd94rtd

But Staples and Office Despot have eleventy-seven different little
notebooks, starting at $0.98, use whatever.

>  The one thing that shows up is after 1990 all the queens went down.

Yeah, and seeing something like that is the advantage of keeping actual
RECORDS, rather than half-remembered anecdotes or relying on citations to
stuff they found with the Google confirmation bias machine. 

It is encouraging to hear that there are some small number of productive
queens making it longer than a few years "in service", and that may help us
to find the actual problem.  

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