More bee maths

One of the obvious learning points from the fuss I recently generated after spotting queen cells is that I was just not up to speed enough with the details of some basic bee brood dynamics. There's a decent bee maths page which I've previously posted. A similar, though not quite identical, set of numbers can be found in Hooper's book (page 31 if you have the 4th edition). Alternatively, a decent aide-memoir suggested by some experienced beek friends of mine is "3-5-8-5-3" which when mapped as a cumulative series becomes 3-8-16-21-24 which indicates the number of days after laying on which certain things happen: 3=eggs hatch, 8=brood cells sealed, 16=queens hatch, 21=workers match, 24=drones hatch. Simple to remember, and although not strictly as the books would say the maths works (workers and drone actually cap slightly later on average) it's good enough for me at the moment to help me remember when things happen and hence make me a better reader of my hives.

What does this mean for my hives right now? Well, I recently set up Hive Cleopatra with no queen and a few queen cells. I'm not sure when the eggs in those queen cells were laid, nor when the cells were capped, but I estimate the latter happened on maybe the 4th May. This would indicate hatching on 12th May with the hopefully mated queen laying around the 24th May (give or take a few days). Well, that's given me some form of expectations, vague though they are. Knowing this will make my future hive inspections much more informative.