Hive Population Est. Formula?

[SherryL]

I remember reading it somewhere, but don't remember the numbers.  It's counting the take-offs or landings in a certain amount of time and multiplying by 1000 or 10,000 or something?  

Anyone know what I'm talking about?

The traffic at my red hive (the RR super hive) is so heavy, it's really hard to count during the heaviest travel of the day, but I'm guessing maybe 8-10 take-offs per second.  It's crazy busy.

[Jerrymac]

Well I don't know about all of that, but it seems to me to be a very inaccurate way of counting. My bees traffic is different at different times of the day, different weather, as in cloudy, hot, cool, A storm rolling in, ect, ect.

Then at some point you have near 2,000 bees emerging from cells per day, but they won't be leaving the hive for awhile. Then perhaps other jobs in the hive needs to be done more than gathering, so a bunch stay home to do that work.

A close necter/pollen source makes a faster turn around than a distant necter/pollen source.  

Now if one could determine the number of bees per frame when clustered at night and go count the number of frames at night, that would give a more accurate number I would think.

All I know is my hives have a lot of bees. Except for one.