One of the other posts got me thinking about the number of bees in a hive and the laying rate of a queen.
According to the Thornes catalogue, 10 BS deep frames has 45,000 cells and if we assume that a good frame, on average has, say, 80% of the cells with brood in we would have 3600 per frame. My colonies tend to stick at around 14 - 16 good frames of brood in summer in a double brood set up, so lets say out of 15 frames, the equivalent of two are being prepared for egg-laying at any one time so 13 frames at 3600 eggs/larvae each, which is 46,800 eggs laid in 21 days which is 1950 eggs per day, 81 per hour. This gives the circa 2000 eggs/day usual figure for a good queen. Does this seem about right? And if we assume that bees live for 3 weeks in the hive and 3 weeks as foragers, that would give us 93,600 bees. Too many?
According to the Thornes catalogue, 10 BS deep frames has 45,000 cells and if we assume that a good frame, on average has, say, 80% of the cells with brood in we would have 3600 per frame. My colonies tend to stick at around 14 - 16 good frames of brood in summer in a double brood set up, so lets say out of 15 frames, the equivalent of two are being prepared for egg-laying at any one time so 13 frames at 3600 eggs/larvae each, which is 46,800 eggs laid in 21 days which is 1950 eggs per day, 81 per hour. This gives the circa 2000 eggs/day usual figure for a good queen. Does this seem about right? And if we assume that bees live for 3 weeks in the hive and 3 weeks as foragers, that would give us 93,600 bees. Too many?
May your bees read the same books as you do.