  We study how the electron hopping reduces the Mott-Hubbard band gap in the
limit of a large Coulomb interaction U and as a function of the orbital
degeneracy N. The results support the conclusion that the hopping contribution
grows as roughly \sqrt{N}W, where W is the one-particle band width, but in
certain models a crossover to a \sim NW behavior is found for a sufficiently
large N.
