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A Bee in Math
Wrote another letter-to-the-editor to the OC Register at work today. As usual, it was about some self-described expert who removed a colony live and advocated live removals. In addition to disputing their expert credentials and putting forth Dave's overwhelming qualifications, as usual (and last time I listed them I think I neglected to mention that he has also been deposed as a bee expert a number of times in lawsuits he would not have otherwise had a connection to), and taking issue with their advocation of live removal and release, I homed in on something specific -- by way of discrediting their "expert" description, and correcting a factual error, I took issue with the "experts" statement that the colony they removed in the article had "over 100,000 bees."
This, you see, is quite easily proven a mathematical impossibility.* A queen is capable of laying a whopping 2,500 eggs a day (and there'll be only one queen), and worker bees who make up 99.99% of the hive live an average of 24.7 days, so you can simply multiply these together and find that the maximum size is 61,750 individuals!
Now, I noted that one could certainly allow for bees to live a little bit longer (the lifespan is actually specifically 500 flying hours I think, and if the temperature were to drop below 54f the bees would pretty much stop flying around for winter -- but that doesn't happen here) or maybe the queen to be extremely virile, but thats not going to push the population beyond 70,000. No "expert" would ever estimate a random unnoteworthy exposed colony by a church to have 100,000 bees in it.
* I've heard actually that some yellowjacket colonies at least get so big and crazy that there are queens at opposite ends of the hive who never meet, making it effectively a giant conjoined hive. I dunno if that could happen with a honeybee colony, but I wouldn't absolutely rule out some kind of freakish aberration like that. But in general, beehive populations do not exceed 60,000.
In other news, I happened across this random photographer's photos on flickr and they're kind of amazing.
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