Every hive quietly runs through the same 24-week season of brood, mites and honey stores whichever way you write it down. What changes is how much of that reality actually survives into a usable record. Each hexagonal tile in the rising spiral is one week's inspection: its colour shows the varroa mite level, its height shows honey stores, and its glow shows whether the queen was seen.
UK beekeeping associations recommend recording varroa counts, queen status and stores at every inspection specifically because early warning signs — a rising mite count or a hive that suddenly stops storing honey — are easy to miss in memory alone but obvious once plotted across weeks, whatever tool you use to keep the log.
A rising spiral of 24 weekly hive-inspection tiles shows how much of a hive's real story — mite counts, honey stores, queen sightings — actually makes it into the record depending on whether you write it on paper, type it into a spreadsheet, or log it in an app.
Tile colour tracks varroa mite pressure, tile height tracks honey stores, and a glowing thread connects only the fully-logged weeks — showing exactly which trends a beekeeper could and couldn't have caught from their own notes.
Pick a recording method and inspection interval, then scrub through the season. Toggle the gap highlight to see unlogged weeks pulse red, and the trend line to see how broken or complete the mite-risk picture really is.
The same underlying hive history is reused across methods — only the recording habits change — so switching from "Paper journal" to "Mobile app" on an identical season is a fair side-by-side test of how much data survives.