I have come to believe there is no normal (average) season in Texas but each is unique and you should expect whatever you get.

This year was no exception in that January thru March turn up as constantly cold and dreary wet so the drones and queen rearing started up late and due to wet weather a lot of yards did not get attended to properly < the soil/mud here can be very tricky as several of the students at the bee lab have discovered. The start of queen rearing was about a month late.

April was good but not spectacular.  The weather warmed up some but the nights were still cold < it came to me at that point that we often here and in other bee forums talks about day time temperature but often fail to think about the effect of the temperature at night. The cool nights continued into the first couple weeks of May and a good deal of robbing was evident < likely my largest loss this year was this period in which a good number of new nuclei perished from robbing.

Towards the last of May we had a good rain and the horsemint kicked in which gave us half a crop at best.  We may get another little dollop of honey if it does not get too dry during the summer months < that is IF we have a shower from time to time.

Final analysis we have about a half a crop here and about half of this I will donated to the bee lab. My honey house is about half way deconstructed and we are using the space at the lab and my extracting line to extract the crop and use the event as a learning opportunity.

Gene in Central Texas...  

             ***********************************************
The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software.  For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html