>  In the time it takes to find the scales, get the scale on one hive and get a reading, a good man could have hefted quite a few hives.

The "speed advantage" here was illusory, as while it gave an satisfactory gestalt impression of "heft", it provided no hard data that could be used to:

a) Make a trend-line, and see how long, at current rate of consumption, the hive had before it would starve

b) Notice any "outlier" hives that were consuming more or less than the rest, and might be queenless (not raising brood consumes less stores) or have other issues worthy of attention

So, the advantage of a scale is that it generates objective values that are useful tomorrow, as compared to the subjective gestalt "heft" impression, which is an isolated vague point without context, rather than one of multiple points that can make a line, and have predictive value.  Vectors beat the pants off points, every time.

The underlying challenge is that while one can estimate and get close to a measured value, those estimates are not recorded, so they are lost.  If one were to at least record the estimates, one would have some sort of data, and for some beekeepers, those values would be "accurate enough".

So, heft or not, a notebook and pencil are still the most powerful beekeeping tools, but the time delay to weigh a hive should not be viewed as unacceptable versus the quicker time taken to merely estimate the weight when the goal was to determine the actual weight.

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