a snip of a snip..
> >For me, that 1/3 is the fraction lost between the peak hive
> number during summer honey production and the bottom number going into
> almond pollination after wintering.

my comments..
About the same here.  Since the arrival of varroa I figure a hive at max has a 3 year life span.  I do not treat so my game plan is to rear about 1/3 of my numbers in any given spring for the hives that I know should die in the coming season.  My idea number of hives is about 200 (that is all this old man want to do) and I sell a good number of nucs in the spring of the year.

As a reference I went into the winter (we don't have much of that here) with 187 hives.  Of these 3 have been stacked due to the queens showing up as drone layers.

In 2011 during the drought my numbers dwindled somewhat but I manage to keep most alive by feeding quite a lot of sugar to all the survivors and a small quantity of pollen patties to those hives that literally ran out of pollen.  The plus being that in a severe drought evidently the small hive beetles do not do so well either.

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