Bee Demographics

I've been reading a lot and I keep coming across various numbers that must be "magic."  For example, I read that 8 frames of brood seems to be a happy number for a strong hive, more are better and fewer often need to be strengthened.  I also see various estimates of how many eggs a queen can lay in a day and 2,000 seems to indicate a "good" queen, more a "great" queen and fewer a "so-so" or even "bad" one.  With all this are the truly magic numbers of 3 days in the egg, 6 days as a larva and 12 days as a pupa before a new worker bee emerges so I did some calculations that, to me anyway, are enlightening.

Let's consider a queen who lays 2,000 eggs a day and has plenty of room to do so.  On day 1 she will lay 2,000 eggs and so on.  On day 4 there will be 2,000 young larvae to feed, on day 5 there will be 4,000 larvae to feed and so on up to day 9 when there will be 12,000 larvae to feed.  I don't know how many larvae a nurse bee can feed per day but I would think only a moderately sized population could handle this load.  But on day 9 2,000 larvae will be capped to pupate so from there on there will be only the same 12,000 growing larvae to care for.

Our queen will continue laying 2,000 eggs a day (if she has room) and by day 21 she will have laid some 42,000 eggs.  On that day 2,000 new bees will emerge thereby freeing up 2,000 cells for the queen to lay in again.  So, allowing from some down time to clean up these cells for the queen we can estimate that a queen only needs some, say, 45,000 cells to keep busy laying all her life.  We can also see that this amount of brood in the hive, once built up, will stay about the same as long as she is laying at that rate.

I estimate a medium frame of 4.9 mm cells to contain some 6,000 cells (both sides).  A deep would have maybe 10,000 cells.  If the cells are the "standard" 5.4 mm there would be only about 80% of these numbers (5,000 and 8,000, respectively).  Given that brood frames often have honey and pollen stored in the corners so not all of these numbers will be occupied by brood and assuming 70% would be thus be used, we see that 8 deep frames of the 5.4 mm cells would contain some 45,000 available cells  and we have linked the ideas that 8 frames of brood and a queen laying 2,000 eggs a day are a happy combination.

I don't know it the old-timers made such a calculation or even if it makes much difference (their experiences, which we can take advantage of, that a queen that produces 8 frames of brood is good gives one a measure to evaluate hives).  But for me (and maybe others) who use the smaller cells and medium frames we can guess that the comparable measure is 45,000 divided by 4.200 or 11 frames.  Seems reasonable.

As far as managing with this idea, we can see that starting from a 5-frame nuc that we will need to double or triple those 5 frames as soon as possible.  It also suggests (to me, anyway) that the idea of splitting into 2-brood nucs might ought to be upped to 3-brood nucs.

Hopefully, some food for thought.  Comments welcome.