It is more troublesome to count the number of bees in a nest. Bees don't line up to give you a number.

The Scouts of the Legion of the Divine Envoy also lacked the skills and experience to do so. In the past, the Divine Envoy King's legion had rarely encountered the need to count the number of enemies.

When it is necessary to count the number of your own team, you only need to report to the Legion Commander how many soldiers they have under their command, and the Legion Commander will summarize and report to a responsible Ant King, who will quickly calculate the total strength of our army.

As for the strength of the enemy's army, such as the number of paving ant barbarian armies that are fighting, many commanders tend not to care, or are accustomed to making rough estimates in battle based on the intensity of the battle.

During the civil war in the Big-headed Ant Kingdom, the Divine Envoy Legion can get information from the captured ants of the same kind, and there is no need for the Flying Knight or the Scythe Hunter Scout to estimate the number of opponents.

But fighting an opponent like a bee has never been done before, and it's far more dangerous than dealing with a predator like a praying mantis. So the protagonist still wants to figure out as many enemies as possible. "The Art of War" also says to "know yourself and know your enemy".

But now, the protagonist has a headache about how to calculate the number of bees, and the pit he dug himself can only jump by himself.

They can't get into the hive, and the worker bees flying outside disappear into the sky in a blink of an eye, and there is no way to count them.

It is only then that the protagonist realizes why the Statistical Society has developed into a separate discipline.

After a long time, the protagonist didn't get the hang of it at first, but then finally thought of an alternative.

As far as the protagonist knows, in an ant nest, the ants who go out to work every day generally account for about one-tenth of the ant population, and nine-tenths of the ants work in the nest (such as taking care of the eggs, larvae and pupae, repairing or expanding the nest, serving the male ants and queens, etc.), resting or simply doing nothing.

As long as you can count how many ants are outside a nest, multiply it by ten to roughly deduce the number of ants in the nest.

At this point, we have to explain why only 1 in 10 ants in a nest work outside (mainly foraging).

In other words, any ant nest is actually feeding the whole 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 seventy or eighty percent, to support other officials, monks, craftsmen, and soldiers who are not engaged in agricultural production. Only in modern times will some developed countries be able to achieve less than a tenth of the agricultural population, which will be on par with the average of the ant world.

This is naturally due to the difference in the way the two civilizations obtain food, and the actual output ratio of human beings, whether it is farming or grazing, is not high for most of the time.

Generally speaking, it takes three or four peasants (including those in the countryside who are not able to produce) to have enough surplus food to feed one or two people who are not engaged in agriculture.

For example, the armies of the human world can be used as representatives of large-scale organizations that are not productive. Ancient Chinese rulers had already recognized the "1 out of 10" conscription system, and long-term use would seriously damage the economy. It can be seen that rural areas cannot afford to withstand the decline in the proportion of the working population of "one out of ten".

Relatively speaking, ants have much less pressure to obtain food, after all, humans need a lot of farmland and pasture, intensive labor to obtain enough food, hunting and gathering alone is not enough.

But unlike ants, the vast majority of ant nests survive well by gathering and hunting.

It is also conceivable that for humans, a primitive tribe of about a hundred people, if they hunt a large game of the size of a zebra, it is enough for them to eat for a week. But hunting zebras takes a lot of time to make traps, and zebras are not everywhere, and their breeding rate is not enough to ensure that primitive tribes can hunt zebras every day without scruples, so the zebra herd will soon disappear.

But if it's ants, a nest of 10,000 ants can easily catch more than 100 grasshoppers a day. For ants, grasshoppers are much larger than themselves, about the same size as humans and zebras. And the grasshoppers are so reproductive that the ants don't need to worry about the grasshoppers going extinct. What's more, ants have a lot of prey to choose from.

It is precisely because of the difference in size and environment that ants can feed the entire ant population with a smaller proportion of agricultural ants.

It is precisely because of this characteristic that some scholars who study ants believe that ants are not only not "industrious", but also "lazy".

For example, some scholars have long observed a kind 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 a lifetime to forage, accounting for only 1/24-1/18 of their entire life, which is about equivalent to a human who can live for 70 years and only work for 18-24 years in a lifetime.

In contrast, there was no retirement system in ancient times, and the modern retirement system generally requires more than 30 years of work, which seems to have some truth in this statement.

To get back to the point, the protagonist intends to roughly estimate the size of the hive by multiplying the number of bees out there by ten, which is a big improvement over the previous helplessness.

The Flying Knights perched their flies on the branches of the poplar trees away from the hive, counting the number of bees coming in and out of the hive.

Since there is a branch sticking out under the hole of the hive, it is like a natural take-off and landing platform, so the bees in and out will land here, and then crowd back and forth, they do not have any traffic rules to the right, if they want to reach their destination as soon as possible, they can only rely on crowding.

After counting for ten minutes, the protagonist counts that 15 bees have gone out and 14 have entered the nest. The number of entries and exits is approximately equal.

Based on 15 bees, there are about 90 bees entering or leaving the nest in one hour.

Shortly after the vernal equinox, the bees have 12 hours to work according to the equinox of day and night, so the total number of bees going out in these 12 hours is about 1,080, and if multiplied by ten, the colony has a total of 10,000 worker bees.

The protagonist quickly calculates the result.

However, this result only has a general reference significance.

Statistics requires a large amount of observational data, and the protagonist simply extrapolates based on the observation data within 10 minutes, and the sample is too small, which is easy to deviate from the actual situation.

For example, the frequency of bees coming and going in and out in the morning and evening is obviously much lower than in the middle of the day, and the results of choosing these two time periods will be very different.

But there is no better way for the protagonist, and perhaps fire reconnaissance can make up for this shortcoming.