>QUERY: Does it take more energy for the hive to cover and protect 20 sq cm of 5.25 cells than 20sq cm of 5.35 cells?  

I always cringe when I see questions like this.  On its face, the question will not result in enough information to be useful.  I cringe because people tend to try to draw inferences from the incomplete answers.  It's the old adage of garbage in, and garbage out.  I cringe, because people tend to ask questions like this when they want answers to questions they didn't ask.

Perhaps I am reading more into this than I should.  Perhaps the query was posed out of idle curiosity, and with no intentions of acting upon any information obtained.  Odds are, questions like this are posited to elicit actionable information.

Does it matter which requires more energy?  Not really.  By itself, the answer won't provide us enough information to be able to draw any useful conclusions.

It's like asking how much an investment costs.  The only thing that can reasonably be deduced is if our pockets are deep enough to buy.  A better question would be, "What are the net benefits to the colony comparing equal brood areas of 5.25 mm cells versus 5.35 mm cells?"

>Obviously a tighter, more condensed pattern
(Case A) has more mass than the more spacious configuration (Case B).  So
the answer to Mike's question is, Yes.

This assumes that individual bee larvae/pupal mass is identical in both cell sizes.  It also assumes both cell sizes have equal insulating and heat retention/heat loss rates and equal heat production by the brood.  There's lots of assumptions, and I think most folks know what happens when we assume.

I was taught that when using Boolean logical analysis, the use of words such as "obviously" are used to support invalid inferences.  Nothing is obvious.

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