"Bee Math"....
Recently, I had
eight hives on stands. One ended up being a queenless swarm that was building comb and putting honey up like there was no tomorrow. Another colony had a small double handful swarm of bees in it and was queenright...and though small, she already had brood in about half of three frames in a medium box and the small group of workers was trying it's best to keep up with her. Both colonies seemed to have very good bees...just one was queenless and the other very low in population.
So...I did a newspaper combine which worked great!!! That queen has kicked egg laying into high gear and with that LARGE influx of workers they're drawing comb like crazy and putting up pollen and honey!!!
Well, a few days after I had inspected the combined colony my wife walked down to the hives with me. I had told her that with the combine we were down to seven colonies but when we got down there she asked me how many we had...which was kind of strange because I had already told her "seven" and she was looking right at them. I answered "seven". She asked me again and I looked at her like she was crazy or something. Then she looked at me and basically said "count'em". I counted them and...there were...eight of them!!!<duhhh> Apprently I had miscounted (ya think???) somewhere down the line and had never recounted...just subtracted from what I *thought* we had.
So....eight colonies minus one colony equals eight colonies (8-1=8).....that's Bee Math at it's finest!!!!
Ok, now on to graduate school!!!!!
Ed
