Colony Population Model

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I have now had a chance to play with this model a bit.

It models the colony daily, given a certain starting point, assumptions about mites and weather data.

It produces a numerical output showing the drone and worker populations split into:
- eggs
- lavae
- brood
- adult

It also shows the number of foragers.

It models the mite population and splits them into:
- free mites
- mites on drone brood
- mites on worker brood

It can be set to model re-queening, drone brood removal and varroa treatment and you can set forager life and initial queen strength.

The model uses weather files containing daily figures for max, min and avg temperatures, mm rain, wind speed and hours of daylight. The weather data supplied is, not surprisingly, all US data. The attached file contains data for the south east of England, which I have derived from the met office monthly data. It is repeated for 5 years, allowing multi-year simulations.

To use this file, you need to open the zip file and put the .wth file in the same folder / directory as the rest of the installed files – it should then appear in the list of available weather data.

You can edit the weather file using a simple text editor.

I found it easiest to get intelligible results when I removed the varroa from the system and ran multi-year simulations.

If only bees, weather and varroa were so controllable and predictable in the real world...
 

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