Well… we were supposed to have begun our grafting by this time, but the bees in the cell yard, as well as hives out in the field that would be used for the first nucleuses, have thrown us a curve. Or maybe what I should say is the weather has thrown us a curve. From where we sit today, we should have seen it coming, but we didn’t. It was 87 degrees here at Christmas time and the whole Christmas week was in the mid-80’s. Until two nights ago, we have had no chilling degree hours. A chilling hour is temperatures at or below 40 degrees, the nearer freezing, the better.

     Chilling degree days are necessary for apples, blueberries, and ironically maple trees. Our blueberry growers are expecting fewer blossoms which will mean fewer blueberries because of the warm winter up to this point and what we are experiencing in the bee yard is a profound lack of naturally gathered pollen, which has all but completely shut down brood rearing. This will definitely put us behind our start time by as much as two weeks. We are again applying pollen substitute patties to bees in the field, something we normally would be finished with by this time as we can expect maple pollen by Christmas and willow pollen by mid-January.

     We are getting some frosty evenings and chilly days now this week, which should ebb the maple trees into opening their flower blooms and push the willows into doing the same soon. At this time, as far as the bees are concerned, it is still the dead of winter, and that’s how they are behaving.

     Another irony of the weather is the fact that the bees in North Florida are building better than the bees here in Central Florida. That is because South Georgia and North Florida received more cold weather at the end of the year than we did and things up there are on track calendar-wise.

     We are expecting 65 degrees this afternoon and 72 degrees tomorrow. The bees in the blueberries should be busy and the blueberry pollen should really add a needed boost to those brood nests. I wish we had more bees in blueberries.

Talk to you next week and we’ll tell you how things went in California as bees are arriving there tonight.