Counting Bees

Yesterday I failed to answer the question "How many bees are in there?" about our observation hive. Today I bring you an answer. At least, the best answer I can give you without putting on a bee suit.

5,460 bees in the observation hive!

"That's very specific," you say. You wonder, "How did she get that number?" Well, I am going to answer that question too. I read a scientific paper to figure this out. A scientific paper is an essay that scientists write to tell each other about their experiments.

The paper I read is by Michael Burgett and Intawat Burikam, and was published in 1985.

In this paper, the authors describe an experiment to find out how many bees can live on a standard frame (one of those wooden rectangles with a honey comb in it). They took one frame at a time and two people looked at the frame to estimate what percent of the frame was covered with bees. For example, if only half of the frame had bees on it, they called it 50% covered. If all of the frame was covered by a layer of bees, the frame was 100% covered. Then they took the frames and killed all of the bees with gas (sad!). They killed the bees so that they could weigh them more easily. Don't worry- there were a lot more bees still in the hives. They used our method of weighing the bees to figure out how many there were. So they could use their percent covering estimates and pair them with a number of bees to estimate how many bees on average could fit on the frame (with the help of some secondary school math).

For the size frame that we use, they estimated that 1,820 bees was the largest number of bees that you could fit on a frame. There were 3 frames in our observation hives. If all our frames were 100% covered, that would mean that:

1,820 * 3 = 5,460 bees in the observation hive!

5,460 bees in the observation hive!

That's a lot. To give you an idea how many, the number of people in Philipsburg is about 5,480. So that means you had almost the entire population of Philipsburg (in bees!) on your desk.