I want to follow up on the previous post on Bee Demographics, trying to reach a better understanding of what's going on in the hive and, maybe, get some management insight.
Starting off with some assumptions:
1) the bees are well fed and have plenty of room. Both of these are under the control of the beekeeper.
2) the queen is capable of laying 2,000 eggs a day (and will do so if the above condition is met). We will discuss how the beekeeper can verify or re-estimate this number below.
After Spring build up and the queen has been laying for 21 consecutive days, we can see that the brood will consist of:
3x2,000 = 6,000 eggs
6x2,000 = 12,000 larvae
12x2,000 = 24,000 pupae (capped brood)
The eggs and capped brood need only to be kept warm by the workers. The 12,000 larvae need to be fed and 2,000 need to be capped every day. This is the maximum work load on the workers.
A medium frame of 4.9 mm cells contains about 6,500 cells (both sides). Therefore, a queen laying 2,000 eggs per day requires 7 FULL frames to keep her busy. Once this is reached there will be 2,000 empty cells vacated by emerging workers every day to make room for the 2,000 new eggs to be laid. The actual location of the total brood may migrate but the total area should stay the same. In practice the queen probably won't fill any given frame edge-to-edge because the workers tend to put honey and pollen in the corners. The beekeeper will need to estimate the percentage of brood (in any stage) in each frame to estimate how well the queen is performing. Thus, it will take 14 frames with 50% coverage, 11 frames with 70% coverage, etc for a queen performing at 2,000 eggs per day. More is better, less is worrisome.
In my readings, I've seen advice to give a weaker hive (ie, a hive with significantly less brood) a frame or two of brood from a strong hive (ie, one with a queen that lays 2,000 eggs or more per day). I've also read advice to do the opposite but haven't seen a reason why (except, of course, some master found it worked better!). This analysis tells me what appears to be a better approach. If a colony with a weak queen is give a couple frames of brood there will be a temporary burst of new bees in the hive, but afterwards the amount of brood will settle back down to the previous level which is solely determined by how many eggs the queen can lay per day (always keeping condition 1 above satisfied).
Say you've got a hive where the amount of brood indicates a queen with only 1,000 eggs per day capacity. In 30 days she will produce 30,000 new workers. Sounds good, but compare it to 60,000 new workers per month! Nipping her and allowing the workers to make a new queen will cost you a month of new bees (30,000) but a 2,000/day queen will make that up in a month and then go on building even faster. If you can get a ripe queen cell (or mated, ready-to-lay queen) you can put the drawn comb an other resources in that weak hive to use even faster. (As I write this - April 2014 - I see mated queens offered for $25).
Comments always welcome.
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