Summer 2011

[gavin]

Mornin' Y'all

Spending a few days in North Carolina where they all seem to speak like they do in Deputy Dawg if anyone remembers that. Keeping an eye on the forum when I can. The summer here has been too hot and dry so the maize in the fields has, in some places, burnt up before the plants got far enough for a crop. Not so in Scotland.

Have a look at this from the Met Office:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/anomacts/



This is a rather nice way to see the variation across the UK.

From what I remember of last week, August is going to be rather similar ... but if it is brighter now maybe all is not lost for those of us with bees at the heather.

G.

[Trog]

Very interesting charts. Yes, it was wet in May!

[gavin]

I think that August will be off-the-scale dark blue here, but maybe it will end up as a months of two halves as they say.

[Jon]

April was exceptional for both high temperature and lack of rainfall. We had several days over 20c.
My colonies were on the point of starvation mid June but managed to fill a couple of supers each in July.

I used to love that Deputy Dawg y'all.

Top cat and Officer Dibble had real New Yorker accents

[Adam]

Very interesting charts. Yes, it was wet in May!

Not for me it wasn't!

[gavin]

From the look of that map Adam you could be growing the sweet potatoes they grow here in huge amounts, some of it for export to the UK. Somewhat annoyingly, they call proper potatoes 'Irish potatoes'. Can't for the life of me think why they would want to do that.

Lovely folk anyway.

The maps show quite well why there were puzzled looks on the faces of the east-central Scotland beekeepers at the SASA diseases day in July when beekeepers from Glasgow were positively beaming about all that nectar piling in. And why there was starvation in the west in May.

I don't know why Kintyre was singled out for such treatment in June, or maybe it was just someone piddling into the rain gauge there.

[Jon]

The debate about proper potatoes will have to involve Peruvians and Irish, with the Scots remaining on the sidelines.

The Puebla football team has the nickname of Los Camoteros - the sweet potato men. I have been to a few matches in the Estadio Cuautémoc

[Jimbo]

Hi Gavin,

You just can't get away from the tatties, sweet or otherwise. I have been playing with your maps and if you compare the rainfall for May/June 2010 (which was an average year for swarming and mating) and compare it to May/June 2011 you can see why it was such an unusal year for swarming which continued much later than average years

[gavin]

Tatties are my life (after bees of course) and the trip to NC was not unconnected with that. It will take a deal of arm-twisting to get me to call them Irish potatoes. We made the Peruvians very pleased by proving that the potato was domesticated in southern Peru and not Bolivia as some had thought, so they owe us a favour. That favour will be to call non-Latin spuds 'Scottish potatoes' from this point onwards. All the best varieties are anyway (that's a lie, Rooster was a cracker and it is Irish). Could we just settle on 'Celtic potatoes' as a compromise or does that have tribal connotations in the West of Scotland?

I think that I know the answer to that one.

Twiddling my thumbs at an ungodly hour in Atlanta Airport while we learn just how many hours late our plane will be. Three they said last time, which means that my connection in Amsterdam is stuffed, and on a Friday night when seats on alternative planes and even hotel rooms will be at a premium.

OK, bees. Do we believe that rainfall is the main determinant of bee performance? Wet and warm can be quite productive as long as there are gaps between the heavy stuff. But it will stop queens venturing out presumably.

Who has a series of quantitative swarming/queen mating data that could be compared with a series of weather records?

[Jon]

I am a fan of Rooster, a very tasty potato. Kerr's Pink would be my overall favourite.

I don't have detailed data re matings and weather but my queens mated well in both June and July. June was very wet whereas July was quite warm and dry. But there was at least one perfect flying day every ten days or so. I found that they just waited - and then about 3-4 days after a perfect weather window you would find laying queens in a dozen apideas. Where I do notice a weather related difference is in honey production. A month of wet and cold weather is always a disaster but does not seem to affect the matings too much as long as there are several decent days during the spell of bad weather.

I accidentally left one apidea closed for 12 days and the queen flew and mated within 5 days when I opened it up. I used this one to make up a nuc about 6 weeks ago and she has now filled a brood box.