A marked renewal process model for the size of a honey bee colony

Many areas of agriculture rely on honey bees to provide pollination services and any decline in honey bee numbers can impact on global food security. In order to understand the dynamics of honey bee colonies we present a discrete time marked renewal process model for the size of a colony. We demonstrate that under mild conditions this attains a stationary distribution that depends on the distribution of the numbers of eggs per batch, the probability an egg hatches and the distributions of the times between batches and bee lifetime. This allows an analytic examination of the effect of changing these quantities. We then extend this model to cyclic annual effects where for example the numbers of eggs per batch and the probability an egg hatches may vary over the year.