>> I also hope the farm bill gets vetoed down.  
There are a whole bunch of Food Stamp recipients 
who would disagree with you on that point.

To be honest, I don't see how food stamps should be in the farm bill - I don't know of farmers who require food stamps recepients... ;-)  This seems to be me to be another of our government's non-sense ways of doing the country's business.  Congress needs to stop earmarking, pork bellying, and bundling different programs together in order to push through otherwise indigestable legislation.  This non-sense and abuse has got to stop and the good citizens need to demand the change.

>>There is!  Or "was", as the bill has gone nowhere.
HR 1709 is the House bill and S.1694 is a Senate bill...

There should be great accountability for such wasteful practices on the part of our elected legislators who spent the taxpayers' money to work on a bill only to have it shelved someplace.  Someone should be made to answer for this.

>>...rather than focusing on the simple problem at hand of CCD and
its impact on agriculture.

Our legislators should be taught and certified in the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) rule and be held accountable for adhering to it once certified.

>>Not surprisingly, a lack of two MATCHING bills 
made everyone lose interest in the entire issue,
as it would have required work to come up with
a compromise.

This sort of malpractice is sickening.  Isn't working out good compromises a part of the legislators' job descriptions?

>>Despite the lousy spring weather (cold, damp, cloudy) I had a surprise swarm out of one of the Bronx Zoo hives on May 1, 2008.

What triggered the swarm drive - did they run out of room?  I am always in awe when I see the populations exploding within days - early in the week you see lots of frames with brood plus covering bees and by the weekend you need another deep to house the emerged bees.

>>My bad, I let the bees get ahead of me.  The weather made a tear-down of the sort that would reveal .  Temps in the 40s and low 50s.  All I could do was look quickly at bottom bars.

Low 50's on a sunny, somewhat windless day is ok in my experience for a quick frame-by-frame inspection without chilling the brood.

>>The good news is that the same lousy rainy weather that made a 
decent search for queen cells a move that would have chilled the 
entire broodnest is keeping the swarm in the nuc into which it was
dumped.

I welcome delayed, cool springs for the weaker colonies that take longer to build up for the flow.  The cooler weather - I had frost on my windshield in the morning twice last week! - buys the weaker hives time by pushing to the right the bloom times.  [You do have to reign in your strong colonies though!]  And the flows are often more intense as the bloom times of different species overlap much more closely...  I usually can get a nice, bumper crop after a prolonged, cool spring.

Waldemar

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