Doing a brief search to try and get a better feel for numbers (colony/X
acres) in a mixed urban-rural area, I found the following on the Internet:


   1. It is normal to have up to 100 feral colonies of bees per square mile
   of mixed forest and meadow. This translates to one feral colony/6 acres.
   Above this density and winter losses tend to cut the number of colonies
	significantly.

ReallY?  Where?   That’s an insane number of colonies......Seelys work is a lot lower and all the areas I know of 3-5 is much closer to reality.  100 per square mile????





   2. Average colonies/acre recommended for agricultural crops grown in the
   USA range from 1-7/acre. Most crops that benefit from honey bees require
   2-3/acre.
  
Those numbers are for optimum pollination for a very short window,  and bees starve at those densities normally.  The standard for pollination is to feed bees.   While some crops like canola they do well,  the normal is you need to feed at those
 stocking densities.

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