Wow, those are interesting results.  Which version of Bryce and Bryce Lightning were you trying when you got these results?

I'm going to try with Bryce 6.1.

One other thing to note that has changed in the recent versions, the system that you run Bryce on in a renderfarm situation it does not do any rendering it simply acts as the render manager.

I think this changed with Bryce 5.5.

With Bryce 5.0 you could render with all the machines in the render farm.

So with the new version you would want to run Bryce on the slowest machine.