>> I've been advocating tracking growing degree-days as a way to nail down
>> blooms to within a few days for years now, and I've yet to find any other
>> beekeeper even trying it.  Discouraging.

> Not sure what you mean by degree-days.  The Devon Apicultural Research Group
> is now into its second year of tracking the flowering periods of bee-plants in
> relation to the location and altitude of participants.  Nothing published
> yet.

Growing degree-days are an accurate way to track blooming dates so
that predictions can be made that take the weather into account.
If you know the bloom date for any one year, and have accurate daily
high/low temperature data for that location for each day from the
"winter low" temperature through bloom, you can then predict the exact
bloom date for the same plant anywhere else, based upon high/low temperature
data for THAT location.  Any other approach to tracking blooms is mostly
useless. Growing degree days get you down to within one or two days without
even trying hard, and the math is easy.

If the Devon group is not tracking growing degree-days, you should have
them contact me off list.

> I did something of the sort myself about 20 years ago unsystematically and
> there was quite a wide variation from year to year.

The reason was that the date of the bloom is a function of how much warmth
is available to allow/promote plant growth in that spring, and springs vary.
Greenhouse growers use growing degree-days to be able to schedule blooms down
to the exact day, which is how one has things like blooming poinsettias for
Christmas, large quantities of roses for Valentine's day, and lilies for Easter.

If you send an e-mail to [log in to unmask] and ask her to e-mail you pdf
copies of my Jan 2002 article "Whither Weather?", and Feb 2002 article
"Be A Budding Genius, Not A Blooming Idiot".  They will explain all, complete
with diagrams and charts.  (Please send me copies of what you get, as I don't
think I have pdfs of those myself.)


            jim

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