Allocation of workforce in a colony for various duties

From the Organic Beeks yahoo group and on pg 409 of American Bee Journal this month, in a graph by Randy Oliver—

There is an interesting graph on page 409 of today’s issue of the American
Bee Journal. I cannot find this graph elsewhere on the net. But what it
shows is that a hive with one body of bees will have “X” amount of bees, and
of those about 25% will be employed in thermo regulation, 25% in foraging,
and 50% in the cluster covering the brood, doing other duties, such as
feeding the brood, cleaning and so forth.

For a hive with two bodies of bees there are “2X” number of bees, and the
workload changes so that approximately 15% will be employed in thermo
regulation, 40% foraging, and 35% doing other duties.

For a hive with 3 bodies full of bees, there are “3X” number of bees, and
the workload changes so that approximately 5% will be employed in thermo
regulation, 75% foraging and 20% doing other chores.

To get the absolute amount of foragers the number of bees needs to be
multiplied by the percentage of them which are foragers. This give the
following, where X is the number of bees in a one body hive:

1 body – .25X
2 bodies – .80X or 3.2 times that of 1 body
3 bodies – 2.25X or 9 times that of 1 hive body

The amount of nectar gathered should be close to proportional to these
numbers. The amount of surplus honey should track them as well, although there
will be some deviation due to the amount that must be subtracted for what
is needed to winter, and additional nectar/honey needed to raise additional
bees.

This data shows the absolute necessity to have strong hives to produce
large surpluses. For instance one 3 body hive full of bees will bring in 3
times a much nectar as 3 single body hives added togethe