> On average, in a normal healthy productive colony, what do you think is
the typical population during your own peak season?
I'd guesstimate 40K to 45K per hive, mean peak population.
> What number would you tell the media?
The trick is to not talk to the media. Don't try to educate them, they will
merely cherry-pick your statements for sentence fragments that match their
"narrative arc", despite the lack of any connection with reality.
Interaction from 2005-2015 with documentary film crews, local news, national
news, and book authors/bloggers of all types resulted in the box score
below:
Factual, and fact-checked reporting was done by the late Margo Adler of NPR,
a Swiss TV newsmagazine, and a Japanese documentary film crew. That's it.
Three.
No one else made even the slightest attempt to do reality-based reporting,
and most stories that resulted were clearly based upon preconceived notions
that ignored anything that might contradict their pre-written headline.
The one that annoyed me most was the repeated reports on "too many urban
bees", when the "Million Trees NYC" project had reached the one-million tree
mark, and planted large numbers of high-value bee forage trees (like
basswood) all over the city despite their obvious drawbacks as a "street
tree". Yes, London may have had a problem, but New York never even
approached capacity, and the beekeeping fad wore off quickly when the
hipsters realized that the actual work of beekeeping was nowhere near as
easy as it might have seemed.
The "media" does not go out to ask what the facts are, they go out to
collect video and quotes to match the story they WANT to write.
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