The rainy, cool weather we had about a month ago apparently has severely affected the Wildflower spring nectar flow. The mainstay of the spring honey crop in this area is the Tulip Poplar tree. During its bloom the rainy, windy weather accompanied by cool temperatures either prevented the bees from flying to gather the nectar, washed the nectar away or blew the blossoms off the trees.
The end result is that my bees put up only one fourth to one half the honey they normally put up this time of year. I have talked to a number of other beekeepers in the area and they report the same thing. In fact, one of them has one of his hives on a platform scale. He records the weight gain and loss on a daily basis and reports it to the USDA in Beltsville, MD for their study purposes. He said that the hive this year weighed 100 pounds less than the same time in 2008. Last year I harvested approximately 1400 pounds of local wildflower and this year I think I will be lucky to get 600 pounds. So it looks like the local spring Wildflower honey crop is going to be in short supply. This all serves to remind us that this is really farming and you have your good years and your lean years.
Last week after taking off the honey supers, I moved 13 colonies up to our property in North Carolina to join the bees already there and to hopefully capture the Sourwood nectar flow and to finish building up some of the new colonies I started this year. We’ll see how that goes and I will report on it sometime later this month. Below are a couple of pictures of my friend and fellow beekeeper Jim McClure opening up the hive entrances we had closed off for the move and the hives in place with their supers ready to capture the Sourwood honey. 
The remaining hives here in Alpharetta all appear to be relatively strong and the brood chambers, where the queen lives and they raise their young, have plenty of bees and nectar stored for now. That may change as the usual summer dearth (lack of nectar flow) arrives in July. I am going to have to watch them carefully and feed them a mixture of sugar and water to tide them over until the fall wild flower bloom again produces honey for the bees’ winter stores.