> When evaluating queens for breeding this gives very useful information.

Exactly, and selecting and breeding your own stock can give a tremendous boost to health and productivity. 

It is not necessary to go to great detail.  Assuming you have more than a few hives, as few as twenty and maybe hundreds or thousands, simply selecting the best, isolating them then picking the best of the best for grafting then keeping the rest in the breeding yard for drones can make a huge improvement in even one year. 

Although we kept computerized records for yard inventory  logistics, and assignments, we used only paper report sheets in the yards.  I personally entered the reports  into Excel at home, then printed the currently relevant columns for the staff's reference in the yards next day. 

We didn't record production numbers, however, on an ongoing basis as we did not consider that useful given that the flowering crops in the area vary and one year's  crop is no predictor of the next. 

The comparative performance of hives in a yard are predictive however, even though we know position in the yard matters and that some hives are collector hives and that some may have had a late start or a brood break. 

That is why we marked and used several of the best and did not worry about the lesser producers.  Whatever their issues might be -- their fault or their luck -- we knew the best ones were the best and if they were lucky, that was just a bonus.

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