Hi All,

The trees are coming into bloom--on sandy soil first, then clay.
Weather is perfect!  Bloom will likely be very short.  Bees are being
graded this week.

I received a wonderful example of beekeeper business logic in my mail
(in response to my post about the large beekeeper going to the Dakotas
and barely breaking even), and am posting it by permission of the
author, Barry Digman:

So, anyway, there were a couple of boys down in Georgia, Bubba and
Bubba, that decided they were going to get into the almond pollination
business and make their fortune. They'd heard that those California
almond growers were paying better than $150 for a hive of bees, and
that a fellow could rent all he could haul out there.

So they gathered up 400 of their hives, got 'em loaded onto a truck,
and headed for the promised land. It wasn't as easy as they thought,
but eventually they found a grower to take the bees at $72 per hive.
They got them unloaded in the orchard, and headed on back to Georgia
to take care of business while the almonds bloomed. Well, nature took
it's course, and between the rain and the mites and the other diseases
that had been packed into the orchards by the million or so other
hives, the Georgia boys took quite a beating by the time they'd
finished up and gotten all their bees back home.

After all the expenses were added up and the deadouts counted and the
time and effort figured in, they figured it actually cost them $73 per
hive, and they'd lost around a dollar per hive for their trouble. That
just didn't seem right, so they put their heads together to come up
with a plan for next year. After a while, the smart one said "I've got
it!! We need a BIGGER truck!".

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