I received the following email from a friend in Europe.  I am quoting it here
because it seems to support something I have observed here before, and that it
is this:

It seems to me that when there is a heavy flow on, that *virtually all* the bees
in the hive must be flying bees.  I have concluded this because when we tip up
boxes to take the honey by the abandonment method, *all* the bees in the supers
leave and seem to find a hive without difficulty (so they know what it looks
like and where it is).  The supers are left empty, and no lost bees are seen.
At other times of year, the bees do not leave supers tipped up, and if blown out
appear lost and are not able to find a hive unless they are able to find fanning
bees marking an entrance.

Here is what he says:

"I will just answer to your post regarding the life time of a bee in
summer time. There was a critical paper to that question in the German
Bienenjournal February 2001 (page 4 to6) by Dr. Liebig. The title
(translated) How many bees are rearly in a beehive? Thei counted the
brood and they determined how many bees were in the hive at intervals
of 3 weeks and plotted these data. The outcame was that in summer time
there is a statistical life span of a bee of 21 days!!!! Thus all the
stories in the bee books about a bee doing discrete duties during her
life before becomming a foranger bee seem to be not correct. They
found strongest hives had no more than 40.000 bees. So in summer time
you should find 1500 to 2000 dead bees a day per normal bee hive".

I am still actually wanting to know how many bees die *inside* the beehive *as
opposed to* those that die in the field or elsewhere outside, since, if I use a
dead bee trap to examine the bees that are being removed dead from  the hive (to
see if the queen has been killed), I need to know what capacity it must have.

allen

http://www.internode.net/HoneyBee/
---
I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don't know what to feed it. --
Steven Wright