Great post Jerry.  You hit a lot of important points one after the other.

I'll comment on just a couple.

> Queens vary widely in their per day production.  There are lots of myths
> regarding good and poor queens.  One is that large areas of contiguous
> capped brood = a good queen = healthy brood

That is always nice to look at, but what really matters is the total area and
whether it is well nourished and healthy.  I am not sure at what level of
(mal)nutrition, the bees actually stop making new brood.  It would seem that
there is a value to making fewer well fed bees, but also a value to having
larger numbers -- even if the resulting bees are smaller, and weaker.  I don't
know how the go/no-go decision is made.

> In the spring, the queen can and may really crank out the eggs.  But, our
> models and data both indicate that the colony can only support the amount
> of brood that can be fed and covered by the current bee population.

We've seen this over and over again.  The queen is seldom the limiting factor in
hive development around here until late May, at which time it is easy to replace
her or split the colony to get maximum use of the nurse bees.

>At
> about 2 brood (eggs, larvae, pupae) per adult bee, the colony seems to hit
> an upper limit and either the queen shuts down and/or the bees remove any
> additional eggs.  This ratio seems to change somewhat with time of year.

That's a valuable rule of thumb.  I've been aware of the relationship, but never
quantized it.  When I compare it to my experience, it holds well.  A two pound
package has about 7,000 bees, I think, so that means 14,000 cells maximum brood
by your rule.  That is equivalent to two 100% full standard frames of brood,
plus a little.  Frankly, until the weather warms in May, and the pollen gets
going, we don't get that much.  Maybe we get -- going by memory -- about half
that initially.  We may approach that upper limit during the second cycle as the
populations begin to balance in age.

allen
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