Kelly Ward, age 9, of Carmen, Oklahoma, for his question:

How many bees are in an average hive?

The hive always shelters a few thousand honeybees, but their numbers change with the season. The crowd is biggest in summer, when the fields and gardens are full of flowery blossoms. When winter comes, the flowers fade and the air outdoors is too cold for bee comfort. Then the teeming crowd dwindles down. The remaining bees shelter in the cozy hive, cluster in a ball, and ration their stores of honey. When warm spring weather returns, they get busy again and start building up the size of the colony.

At the peak of the flowery summer season, there are perhaps 70,000 honeybees in the hive. This is not counting the baby larva bees or the unhatched pupa bees sleeping in their waxen cells. Nor is it counting the eggs    and at this season the queen mother may lay as many as 2,000 eggs in a single day. The adult bees are workers and during the busy season most of them live only about six weeks. But this does not reduce the numbers of bees in the hive. As the weary workers die, far more young bees hatch to replace them every day.

Obviously the hive gets crowded, even too crowded for bees, who like to live huddled close together. When living conditions in the hive get too crowded, the queen mother decides it's time to move. She leaves home and several thousand worker bees go with her. Perhaps 10,000 to 80,000 of them swarm together in a big round ball on a bough. Chances are, a beekeeper coaxes the swarm into one of his man made hives. But if nobody notices it, the bees and their queen mother build a new home for themselves.

Meantime, back at the old hive, a new queen has hatched and also several male drone bees. In a few days, she goes off with the drones on a marriage flight. When she returns, she starts laying eggs. The worker bees that did not leave with the old queen tend the new broods. As the young ones hatch, the numbers in the hive grow from a few thousand to perhaps 50,000 or so. By now the summer is late and the flowers are fading. In some mysterious way, the members of the hive know it's time to prepare for the winter season.

There are fewer flowers to provide dusty pollen for making beebread and sweet nectar for making honey. The queen lays fewer and fewer eggs and finally stops altogether. The workers stop feeding the lazy drones and even throw them out of the hive. Many weary workers die and no young bees hatch. When the first frost comes, perhaps only 10,000 workers and their queen mother are left in the hive. Many of the workers die before spring. But the queen starts rebuilding the colony even if only a few hundred workers are left to tend her and the babies.

People have known for ages that bees fertilize flowers and help them produce more fruits and seeds. Nowadays, most hives belong to beekeepers. They rent them out in blossom time to orchard growers and to farmers who grow seed crops. Some types of honeybee do better than others    and a sensible beekeeper buys the best. In one of his average hives, the number of bees varies from around 70,000 in summer to perhaps 10,000 in winter.