Hi Garth!
 
I am just extracting my last honey of the year and thought it would be
interesting to weigh my supers and compare them with yours. A well filled
and capped medium super produced 32 lb of honey. Since I use 8 frames per
super this yields 4 lb of honey. I sell it in 2 lb tins, so this gives 2
tins per frame. You might like to compare the simplicity of this result
in the Imperial system with your metric result.
 
A comment on the significance of our having ten fingers might not be out
of place here. It has led to our selecting ten as the base for our number
system and is as unfortunate as it could possibly be. The natural
base-which is used for nearly all computations- is base two. Computers and
calculators have a fairly complex routine for displaying the results in
our awkward and unnatural system. Any system using a power of two for the
base would have been better.
 
The metric system itself is not really dependent on using base ten. It has
a lot of trouble with some its units ( the Pascal being one of them
)  being so small that they are not usable directly. This is patched up by
having a list of prefixes like kilo, mega, etc. for the large multipliers
required. Another problem is the tendency to give names to derived units
such as the Pascal rather than using the Imperial approach giving the form
of the unit ( for example pounds per square inch ). I doubt whether one in
a hundred of the people in a Metric country can tell you what a Pascal
really is - I know our students can't.
 
Best Regards,
 
Donald Aitken
11710-129 Street
Edmonton Alberta Canada
T5M 0Y7