Persistent questions persist about a detail irrelevant to the discussion...

>> 2021-04-25 16:02 But, tell us, where did your "60%, 20%" figures come
from?

>>> 2021-04-30 10:33 Where did the "60%, 20%" figures come from? 


> Could it be that 32.8 + 31.8 = 64.6 rounded off to 60%...

We have a winner!

In a self-reporting survey like BIP, the home page summarizes (I guess this
is combined for all years):

Backyard:	55607 responses , managed colonies averaged 6.5
Sideline:	2148 responses, managed colonies averaged 139
Commercial:	178 responses, managed colonies averaged 4827

When your "sideliner" colony count averages "139", you clearly have a whole
lot of fellows who are actually hobbyists calling themselves "sideliners" in
there to bring down the average number of colonies.
When your "commercial" colony count averages UNDER 5K, you clearly have a
whole lot of fellows who are actually sideliners calling themselves
"commercial".

So, what to do?  The data speaks for itself - the "commercial" number is
actually the likely combined "sideliner" and "commercial" report, while
"sideliner" represent mostly hobbies gone completely out of control, and the
"hobby" are the hobbyists lacking delusions of grandeur. 

Enrico Fermi taught the world how to properly estimate, and get results in
the correct order of magnitude, which is all one can expect from estimates,
anyway.

His way of estimating used only powers of 10:
Fermi(x) = 10^(rounded(log[base 10]x))  so,  3 rounds down to 1 and 4 rounds
up to 10, and there are no values but 1 and powers of 10 to manipulate

This approach is great for dealing with larger numbers, not so great for
smaller ones, as I would be 10 feet tall, have 1 arm, and be 100 years old.

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