Leigh Hauter said:

> Our farm and hives are located in the middle of an Oak and
> Tulip tree forest in Virginia.

That's our big spring crop too here down in Bedford County (SW VA).
Its not bad honey.  Its not great honey either, but it'll do.

> He said that he believed we could go well over 200 hives
> without beginning  to tap the tulip tree nectar flow.

This may well be true for the Tulip Poplar bloom, but what is
this larger number of hives going to do for a living for the
REST of the season?

A schedule like:

  1)  Tulip Poplar Blooms
  2)  Harvest
  3)  1 - 2 Month Wait - Colony Dwindles?
  4)  Sourwood Blooms

Sounds like a recipe for starvation, unless you have something
else reliable for the bees to work in step (3).  Now this is not
critical for smaller number of hives who will always find
something or other, but if you try to "flood" the target crop
of blooms with bees, you may find that they overwhelm the OTHER
nectar sources.  I'd guess this problem would only be worse in a
heavily forested area.

The whole question of "How many hives per yard"?  Is similar
to the question "How many lids in a jar"?  The number of lids
in a jar depends on the size of the jar. :)

The only way to tell is to add hives, but have a "plan b",
where if yield per hive goes down in terms of colony weight
gain per week during a confirmed major bloom, hives get moved
to "site b".

> (that, of course, would apply to a normal year and not
> last year's disastrous flow from the Tulip trees).

You mean the disastrous complete LACK of harvested nectar!  :)

Last spring and summer was so wet, I started laying the keel for
a boat and putting want-ads in the paper for breeding pairs of animals
and gopherwood lumber.

                jim

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