Well another winter is hopefully behind us as we begin to feel the warmth and sunshine and experience longer days... we'll be planting again soon. It also causes us to look forward to harvesting some more of that delicious Raw Ohio Honey! It will be a goal to maintain 20-25 honeybee colonies going into Fall. To get there we'll need to do some splits. We'll also build some additional swarm traps and get them placed before April 1st. Last year we put out 10 traps and captured 10 swarms!
It's been a very mild winter once again as it was in 2016, except even warmer. This year we really didn't experience any extremely cold weather or substantial snowfall. This warm winter/early spring also causes some of the early sources of pollen and nectar to be available earlier to the bees. The silver maple is the earliest available source of natural food for the bees followed closely by the red maple bloom.
There is a very useful tool that I have found called the Ohio Phenology Calendar put together by The Ohio State University. Essentially, researchers have figured out that all perennials first bloom is based on accumulated growing degree days. Here is the formula.... High Temp for the day plus low temp. Divide by 2. Subtract 50. A positive number above 50 therefore is recorded as a growing degree day (GDD). Accumulate 34 GDDs and your silver maples will bloom. My personal observations are that this has been spot on for the past 2 years since I've been following this method. Today in my zipcode of 45106 we are currently at 144 GDDs which means that as of yesterday our bradford pears should have begun their first bloom.
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