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  • Liebefeld Method’ to estimate honey bee colony

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General Q&A, Bee chat and only Bee chat please
 #5588  by Chrisbarlow
 28 Jan 2020, 17:44
I'm not surprised but I didn't that a scientific way to estimate colony strength is called the Liebefeld Method

Read about its history and useage here

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13592-019-00728-2
 #5593  by AdamD
 28 Jan 2020, 19:37
For scientific work, a standard method makes sense, especially if there are more than one person doing the work. For me, I count the number of frames of brood - irrespective of the density - so an outside frame with just a small patch is still classed as a 'frame of brood' as is a middle frame which is wall-to-wall brood. I guess I could estimate that the centre frame is, say, 90% covered in brood and the outside frame is, say, 20% covered and then work out the brood area for the complete hive, but I have no need to. Knowing my simple number of frames of brood, comparing to a previous assessment and the time of year, I can assess whether the colony is going to need a super soon, it's static or is perhaps failing. (With several colonies it's easy to determine if a colony is failing when compared to the rest). The only time when my method is not so good is when the brood is patchy as the queen might be laying over more frames than she would otherwise; an example of this is with old, droney comb which I have to admit, I do have from time to time!