Good morning:

I know that I have addressed this issue in the past, should be in the
archives.  We looked at 10s of thousands of bees in Montana back in the 70s
and have presented here before.  Our data approximates that of C. Mitchell,
UC Davis, 1970, ABJ 110.

She reported:

4,451 newly emerged bees per pound (9,804 per kg)
5,159 mature workers per pound (11,360 per kg)
3,492 heavy smoked workers per pound (7,690 kg)
2,000 drones per pound (4,400) per kg

Literature extremes run from 3,000 workers per pound (6,662 per kg) to
5,600 per pound (12,500 per kg).

Average from literature is about 90 mg per bee.

That's close to our weights which ranged from 90 mg to 0.1 g per adult
worker bee.

If asked, my usual response is that a bee weighs about 1/10 of a gm and
that there are about 4500 bees per pound.  Also, a bee is about 2/3 water
by weight.

Jerry

P.S.  Roger Morse did the leg work rounding up these numbers for one of his
books some years ago.

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