Greetings
Apropos of the discussion on colony size is this question: what is the
optimal size for the health of the colony? Farrar and others showed
that honey production goes way up with very large colonies. For
example, one hive of 60 thousand can produce 50 percent more honey
than 4 hives with 15 thousand bees each. That's why Farrar
experimented with two queen colonies, which actually could have had
120 thousand bees in them

However, Harbo showed that the optimal size for producing bees was a
smaller colony. And as I mentioned previously, very large colonies may
not be ideal for over-wintering. Pollinating units do not have to be
overlarge, either. So the question arises, what is the ideal size for
such things as hygiene, disease resistance, colony defense, etc.? I
don't know this, but I can point out that in nature very large
colonies are not the general rule. Further, in other branches of
agriculture the push for productivity has repeatedly resulted in a
trade off for pest and disease resistance, vigor, etc.

Perhaps a bee colony can become "top heavy", and lose a certain degree
of its efficiency, like a large unmanageable company. Maybe a compact
medium sized colony is more healthy on the whole, than great big
hives. I have noticed that strong hives succumbed to mites where
smaller ones didn't. It's possible that a very large hive becomes
preoccupied with the huge amount of honey pouring in and fails to
monitor other important activities.


-- 
Peter L Borst
Danby, NY USA
42.35, -76.50
http://picasaweb.google.com/peterlborst

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