Package bee day for NYC today, so we have assembled a small ragtag convoy of
minivans, pickups, and Volvo wagons to make the run to West Overshoe PA for
an illicit rendezvous at some decrepit truck stop just after dawn to hand
over a briefcase full of cash, load the packages and bring them back to the
city right under the noses of the Dept of Homeland Insecurity
bridge-and-tunnel task force.  Why is the trade in bees so much like the
trade in illegal drugs?

 

And the warm weather just showed up in time.  We were expecting to have to
demote a few dozen supers of drawn comb to brood comb use so that all the
novices getting the packages could have a pair of pre-drawn combs to give
their packages somewhere to cluster and store feed until warmer weather
arrived.  

 

Also, the long colder winter has created a tightly-wound spring that is
sproinging right here, right now in the mid-Atlantic, with many (most!)
colonies not even ready to split.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/nyregion/delayed-by-stubborn-winter-spring
s-colors-are-ready-to-burst.html

or

http://tinyurl.com/nm46qcv

 

(By the way, one reads NY Times articles using the Chrome browser's
"incognito" mode to avoid their paywall, as it was apparently coded by
Larry, Moe and Curly of the Three Stooges)

 

So, the first reliable flying weather this year will apparently offer the
simultaneous blooms of several plants not known to have overlapping bloom
periods.  Strange days.  Isn't a nice diurnal-seasonal abnormality we're
having?

 

But even with global warming's slow but steading erosion of spring as we
knew her, the message here is "super up" if you are East of Pittsburgh,
North of the Mason-Dixon, and too far South to attend Red Sox home games.
Nothing more fun that counting ones unhatched chickens in terms of boxes of
drawn comb deployed per hive.   But if we were not irrepressible cock-eyed
optimists, we would not be attempting to keep a threatened species of
stinging insect in boxes, now would we?

 

Strange Days.  People are Strange.  Love me Two Times When the Music's Over.

 


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