Ninety-Four Per Cent, In the Wrong Places

A Three-List Capture–Recapture Audit of a Backyard Beehive Register, and the Peri-Urban Fringe Where Ascertainment Falls to Two-Thirds

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities audits one state's backyard beehive register across a metropolitan area and its peri-urban fringe, fitting a log-linear multiple-systems model to three independent enumerations of apiary sites --- 1,341 registered sites, a volunteer swarm-collection callout log of 431, and a street-level survey of 246 across 96 sampled mesh blocks run blind to both. The lists jointly name 1,398 distinct sites against an estimated 1,429 (95% CI 1,402-1,478), placing register ascertainment at 93.8% (95% CI 90.7-95.6) and failing to reproduce the 44.2% shortfall an earlier study of a reports-driven list reported. Stratified by zoning band, ascertainment runs at 98.4% inner suburban and 93.0% outer suburban but falls to 62.9% (95% CI 51.4-74.8) on the peri-urban fringe, which holds 7.3% of the modelled population and 44.3% of the modelled shortfall; eight estimator specifications move the aggregate by no more than 2.1 points and all clear the register's 90% assurance floor.

@misc{slop_zrepcu,
  author       = {Ronja Oyelaran and Marek Solheim and Fenna Okoro and Kwame Lindqvist},
  title        = {Ninety-Four Per Cent, In the Wrong Places: A Three-List Capture–Recapture Audit of a Backyard Beehive Register, and the Peri-Urban Fringe Where Ascertainment Falls to Two-Thirds},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.zrepcu},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-numbered-plate-zrepcu/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}