It is troublesome to count the number of bees in a nest. The bees will not line up for you to count one by one.
The scouts of the Divine Envoy King's Legion also lack skills and experience in this area. In the past, the Divine Envoy King Army rarely encountered situations where it was necessary to count the number of enemies.
When it is necessary to count the number of one's own troops, each squad commander only needs to report to the legion commander how many warriors he has under his command. The legion commander will then summarize and report to a responsible male ant king. This male ant king will soon be able to Calculate the total strength of our army.
As for the enemy's strength, such as the number of Pavement Ant barbarian troops fighting, many commanders often don't care, or are used to making rough estimates based on the intensity of the battle during the battle.
During the civil war in the Big-headed Ant Kingdom, the Angel King Legion could obtain information from captured ants of the same species, and there was no need for flying knights or hunting ant scouts to estimate the opponent's number.
But going to war with an opponent like a bee is something that has never been done before, and is far more dangerous than dealing with a fierce insect like a praying mantis. Therefore, the protagonist still hopes to find out the number of enemies as much as possible. "The Art of War" also says to "know yourself and the enemy."
But now, the protagonist has a headache on how to calculate the number of bees. He can only jump out of the hole he dug.
They couldn't enter the hive, and the worker bees flying outside disappeared into the sky in the blink of an eye, making them impossible to count.
Only then did the protagonist realize why statistics developed into a separate discipline.
After wandering around for a long time, the protagonist couldn't figure it out at first, but finally thought of an alternative method.
As far as the protagonist knows, in an ant nest, the ants that go out to work every day generally account for about one-tenth of the ant colony, and nine-tenths of the ants work in the nest (such as taking care of ant eggs, larvae, and pupae). , repair or expand the nest, serve male ants and queen ants, etc.), rest or simply do nothing.
As long as you can count how many ants are outside a nest, multiplying by ten can roughly deduce the number of ant colonies in the nest.
At this point, we have to explain a question: why only one-tenth of the ants in an ant nest are working outside (mainly foraging).
In other words, any ant nest is actually supporting the entire society with one-tenth of the agricultural ant population for a long time.
In most periods of the development of human society, the agricultural population must account for more than half, or even 70 to 80%, to be enough to support other officials, monks, craftsmen, and soldiers who are not engaged in agricultural production. Only in modern times, the agricultural population in some developed countries will be less than one-tenth of the population, which will be the same as the average level in the ant world.
This is naturally due to the different ways in which the two civilizations obtain food. Whether humans engage in agricultural activities such as farming or grazing, the actual output ratio is not high most of the time.
Generally speaking, it takes three or four farmers (including young and old in rural areas who are unable to produce) to have enough surplus food to support one or two people who are not engaged in agriculture.
For example, the army of the human world can serve as a representative of a large-scale organization that is not involved in production. Ancient Chinese rulers had realized that the "one out of ten" conscription system would seriously damage the economy if used for a long time. It can be seen that rural areas cannot afford the "one out of ten" proportion of the working population to decline.
Relatively speaking, the pressure on ants to obtain food is much less. After all, humans need a large amount of farmland and pasture and intensive labor to obtain enough food. Hunting and gathering alone are not enough.
But ants are different. Most ant nests can survive just by gathering and hunting.
This is also conceivable. For humans, there are about a hundred people in a primitive tribe. If they hunt a large prey of the size of a zebra, it will be enough for them to eat for a week. However, hunting zebras requires a lot of time to make traps, and zebras are not found everywhere, and their reproduction rate is not enough to ensure that primitive tribes can hunt zebras every day without hesitation, and the zebra herds will soon disappear.
But if it is ants, a nest of 10,000 ants can easily capture more than a hundred grasshoppers every day. For ants, grasshoppers are much larger than themselves, about the same size as humans and zebras. Moreover, the reproductive capacity of grasshoppers is amazing, and ants do not need to worry about the extinction of grasshoppers. What's more, ants have a lot of prey choices.
It is precisely because of differences in body size and environment that ants can use a smaller proportion of their agricultural colonies to support their entire colony.
It is precisely because of this characteristic that some scholars who study ants believe that ants are not only not "hard-working", but can also be called "lazy".
For example, some scholars have long observed a type of ant worker ants with an average lifespan of two years, and found that these worker ants only spend an average of 30-40 days in their lives foraging, accounting for only 1/24-1/18 of their entire lives, which is approximately equivalent to living A seventy-year-old human being only works for 18-24 years in a lifetime.
In contrast, there was no retirement system in ancient times, and modern retirement systems generally require more than thirty years of work. It seems that this statement has some truth.
Closer to home, the protagonist plans to roughly estimate the size of the hive by multiplying the number of bees outside by ten. This is a big improvement over the previous inability to do anything.
The fly riders landed the flies on the branches of the poplar tree away from the hive, and counted the number of bees coming in and out of the hive.
Since there is an outstretched tree branch under the honeycomb tree hole, which is like a natural landing platform, the bees coming in and out will land here, and then rush back and forth in crowds. They do not have any right-hand traffic rules, and they want to go as quickly as possible. To reach your destination, you can only rely on crowding.
After counting for ten minutes, the protagonist counted 15 bees going out and 14 bees entering the nest during this period. The number of entries and exits is approximately equal.
Taking 15 as the base number, converted into one hour, there will be about 90 bees entering or leaving the nest.
The spring equinox has just passed. According to the twelve hours of day and night, bees have twelve hours to work. So the total number of bees out in these twelve hours is about 1080. If multiplied by ten, the bee colony has a total of Thousands of worker bees.
The protagonist quickly calculated the result.
However, this result only has a general reference significance.
Statistics require a large amount of observation data, and the protagonist simply makes inferences based on the observation data within ten minutes. The sample is too small, which can easily deviate from the actual situation.
For example, the frequency of bees coming in and out in the morning and evening is obviously much lower than that at noon. The results calculated by choosing these two time periods will be very different.
But the protagonist has no better way. Perhaps fire detection can make up for this shortcoming.
