Models of honey bee colony growth and phenology need data for field validation, but getting that data can be tricky. Purely visual (subjective) assessments of adult bee and brood populations tend to have high variability and depend on the skill and experience of the person(s) doing the assessments. Objective assessments, for example, the estimation of brood levels via image analysis of frame photographs, are invasive, and frequent disturbance of honey bee hives to obtain the necessary data may provoke strong defensive reactions, queen loss, and/ or absconding. Continuous monitoring of hive parameters such as temperature and weight, however, may provide much of the needed information with little or no disturbance. Continuous temperature and weight data can be divided into long-term (daily averages, for example) and within-day changes. Information on, for example, brood levels and foraging activity and success can be extracted from the data and used to estimate colony age structure and food inputs for population models. Different methods to detrend continuous data, to model the resulting residuals and their use as response variables in field experiments will be discussed.