Weighing the hive (continued 9) - correcting an exaggeration :o)

In my last post I estimated that it takes more than 300000 trips to collect 1.6 kg. This was under the assumption that one bee takes home about 5 mg. Doing a bit of internet searching I found that this was a somewhat low estimate :o)

Mythbusters have an episode called "1000 Bees" where they test the lifting capability of one bee. They find that the bee could lift 96 mg. Since the mass of the bees was 118 mg it could in fact lift 81% of it own weight. The estimated 5 mg already seems a bit low....

Then I found an useful post on www.quora.com: How much can a bee carry? Three references are quoted and even though I did not check these they do not look like "utter rubbish". The post states typical loads collected by foraging honey bees are:
   30-50 mg of nectar and
   16 mg of pollen (8 mg in each pollen basket on their legs)

Further more the post states that 58% of the bees collect only nectar, 25% collect only pollen and 17% collect both. So the average bee collect:
58% x ~ 45 mg = 26.1 mg
25% x 16 mg = 4.0 mg
17% x (40+16) mg = 9.5 mg
Total =39.6 mg ~ 40 mg

So to collect 1.6 kg it takes "only" 40000 trips and not 320000 trips. Also, a bee is by standard said to weigh 0.1 g (or 100 mg) and will be able to lift about 80 mg according to the Mythbusters test. On average the bee will therefore load itself to about half of its lifting capacity.

Due to the great weather these last few days, I have been weighing the hive daily to see if 1.6 kg corresponds to a typical days work. The "weight loss" per day now looks like this

The last measuring point is just short 2 kg collected in one day (!) which corresponds to 50000 trips. So all in all I will assume that on a day with good weather and plenty of nectar, the bees will take 50000 trips in one day and collect almost 2 kg. In principle it means that a box with 10 frames (size 12x10) will be full of honey (20 kg) in about 1½ week.

No wonder it is called busy as a bee......