Bees per hive per year

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Anthony Appleyard

House Bee
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If a hive's queen (or succession of queens) lay n worker eggs in a year, and thus about n worker bees have lived in that hive in that year, what does that hive's maximum worker workforce in that year tend to be?
 
Impossible to know exactly as a lot variables are undeterminable and it would be pure assumption. For example you could determine with a certain accuracy how many brood cycle you get in a year (21) but it is impossible to know how many worker eggs a queen will lay per cycle. You could work on the premise that a queen lay 1000eggs/day and about 10-15% is drone brood. Realistically, a queen doesn't lay 1000 eggs per day so out through the window goes your calculation.
 
Well you know how Anthony likes his facts and figures so that he can annotate Wiki pages
Everyone to their own ... I can see the vital nature of the addition of such figures to Wiki ... Yawn.... remind me when I am less busy to get my computer geek son to work out an algorythm - perhaps one a bit like the one they used to calculate the UK Exam results during Covid ...ZZZZzzzzzzzz
 
A starting point might be this paper:
Becher, M.A., et al., Brood temperature, task division and colony survival in honeybees: A model
Then develop it to cover the different perspective....
 
Somewhere around 270,000 - 300,000 eggs a season give or take a few thousand.
a workers life is around 6 weeks so 42 days.
1000 x 42 = 42,000- natural death rates/predation
1500 x 42 = 63,000 - as above
2000 x 42 = 84,000 - as above.

Depends on how prolific the queen is and amount of brood space in hive and a thousand other variables but you get the general idea of the maths I guess. Laying rate fluctuates through the season.
 
Two langstroth boxed has about 16000 swarm bees. Count, how many boxes the hive has. Then, when swarm has been 3 weeks in those boxes, there remain only half out of original number.
 
Last edited:
If you follow nature documents, the hive may be 10 litre or 300 litre, but the queen lays always 2000 eggs in a day.
 

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