Thanks for the clarification and apologies or the assumption - I didn't realise you were talking about the mid-game!
Do you feel like resource needs/shortages drive a log of the instability/need for population and production management? I wanted the resource reserve system to give players some non-disruptive controls for managing/mitigating the impact of resource shortfalls, but I also wanted to structure the game so that players would likely experience friction first so that they would appreciate and understand how to use the reserve sliders when they got them.
Regarding point 1, I always wanted Hive Time to be a space where once a player had demonstrated that they understood the game's broad strokes, they could explore the extents of the simulation by setting their own goals. I've since discovered that many players aren't primed for that kind of experience, and I popped some suggestions in the "What now?" topic of the Beepedia's Help/Tips category. That said, "scenarios" were something that I had on my roadmap for what would have been the game's last major content update if things had've turned out differently.
To give some clarity to point 2, the under-the-hood mechanic for processing Beesitter labour allows up to three bees' worth of "birth debt" to be accumulated if the population is at its limit. This allows up to three bees to be spawned immediately at once as the population fluctuates so that there's no waiting period before the next bee appears. Because of this, your population will never be able to go above three bees per "tick" (a unit of game time that is not directly frame rate dependent, but will get longer if the game is running slowly) from Beesitter labour alone.
Whenever a new bee spawns at an upgraded nursery, there's a random chance for twins, which happens regardless of Beesitters or birth debt, so not having regular nurseries can push you a tiny bit higher, but there's still a theoretical limit that's affected by performance. It's also worth noting that Upgraded Beesitters' labour is worth more, so they'll reach that limit with fewer bees, making the maximum number of bees smaller (but the size of the non-Beesitter population would still be as large).
The most I've heard of someone having in the wild is 1800 bees, but I've tweaked how Beesitter labour is processed since then and haven't done a lot of thorough testing of where the fuzzy boundaries lie since. I might poke around with that next time I stream.
The Beepedia error is definitely a bug. I launched a new game today and need to give that most of my attention for a little while, but I'll get a patch with a fix for that out soon. Thanks!
Thanks again for your kind words. It's always nice to hear when Hive Time has resonated with someone. I'm very glad that Hive Time's pay-what-you-want model has prevented Hive Time from being a burden during a difficult time, and I hope your situation improves soon.