Allen said:

> The current price bump is due to quality problems with Chinese honey.

Let's not attribute all of price delta to the Chinese contamination situation.

There are also the widespread drought conditions that have reduced harvests,
and will continue to have impact, both on the current Southern Hemisphere
crops, and this spring's Northern Hemisphere crops.

> I guess the Argentine crop is still unknown...  still early for a good estimate....

One of the widely ignored reasons why NASA space shuttles are critical assets
for everyone on the planet is that they cheaply and accurately launch all sorts of
really neat satellites that send data down to Earth, where US tax dollars turn the
data into pretty pictures, available to all at no charge.  (Mini-Rant:  Columbia was 30
years old!  Would you let your wife drive a 30-year-old car even a few hundred
miles away from home?  Connect the dots.)

I'd say that it is almost no brainier to look at the pretty pictures and predict that Argentina's
crop is going to be smaller than one might expect.  Argentina has been dry enough to
color much of the country pink and red, which mean "dry" and "hot".

http://www.agweb.com/news_show_news_article.asp?file=AgNewsArticle_20031311410_3812&articleid=94943&newscat=GN

Much of North America has been in a general drought for nearly 4 years now, and while the
Eastern USA  seems to be out of trouble at last, those big states west of the Mississippi where
beekeepers with 1,000 hives are called "hobbyists" continue to be seriously dry.
I watch the overall US situation here:

http://www.drought.unl.edu/dm/monitor.html

Most of the planet is covered by this very tidy service, but the metric is not merely
"dry" vs "wet". They track a much more gestalt "vegetation stress index", which I feel
is of much more value in predicting nectar variations.  (Of course, winter is a time to
simply count percip and degree-days rather than worry about "current conditions"...)

http://orbit-net.nesdis.noaa.gov/crad/sat/surf/vci/

Another easy trick is to watch the crop reports and futures prices of bulk commodities
that are traded on the CBOT and other futures exchanges.  Weather than impacts the
bulk crops also impacts nectar plants.  (I've seen a single rainstorm make a 10%
difference in futures contracts, tangible proof of "pennies from heaven".)

What drives all these droughts?  Ocean surface temperatures have been way out of wack,
and the current consensus is that there is a direct connection between ocean temperatures
and downwind rainfall (or lack thereof).


        jim  (Who has found that the secret to it all is to watch Maria Bartiromo of
                   MSNBC on one screen and Christina Abernathy of the Weather Channel
                   on another while playing Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" Album on the stereo...)