Early spring weather this year has been less than ideal in the Southeast part of the country. It's been cool for much longer than usual, and wet and rainy often enough that local ducks are beginning to complain. Record lows in Florida and parts of southern Georgia actually brought snowfall to some areas, taking residents, and honey bees, by surprise.

The USDA maps that document this are all blue, showing temperatures averaging 7-12 degrees below average. That's a significant difference when it comes to plant growth rates.... Everything just sloooowwws doowwn.

From a beekeeper's perspective, this sort of adds insult to injury this season. It's been a very, very hard winter almost everywhere except the Pacific Northwest as far as bees are concerned.

For starters, long stretches of below 40-degree temperatures in the far South have restricted bees from flying and finding food. It's here that beekeepers have been trying to get bees to build up their populations on what are normally lush southern flowers. This slower than usual growth caused some beekeepers to forgo pollinating California's almonds last month, and may restrict both honey production and further expansion in the next month or so....

Energy subsidies are a stick that champions of their favorite energy technologies wield against competing technologies.

Supporters of fossil fuel and nuclear argue that wind, solar, and others in the renewable family are welfare bums that can't stand on their own. Advocates for renewables fire back that fossils and nuclear have been supping at Uncle Sam's table for years.

The fact is that all forms of energy are subsidized. Not one - conservation, renewables, nuclear, or fossils - stands on its own in some libertarian paradise free of tax preferences, research grants, loan guarantees, or other flavors of federal gravy.

That's not necessarily bad. Using subsidies as a rhetorical cudgel clouds a more fundamental question - what are the top energy problems that we're trying to solve and what subsidies should be employed to solve them...?

Ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect? Back in 1999, a couple of researchers in Cornell University's psychology department, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, published a

It’s official. 2009 was a terrible year to be in the honey business. Recently we polled our Honey Market Reporters and came up with an estimate for the U. S. honey crop for 2009. Our guesstimate was 119 million pounds, produced by 2,223,000 colonies. The USDA today released their figures (pdf). Though higher than ours at 144,108,000 pounds of honey, it is still the worst honey crop on record. Ever. USDA figures showed a colony count of 2,462,000 ... a couple hundred thousand higher than our guesstimate.

There’s a couple more numbers that are important here that need to be in the mix. For instance, some beekeepers always have some unsold honey at the end of the year. This honey, left over from last year (2008) has to be added to the honey produced this year (2009). Plus, you also have to add in the honey that was imported into the U.S. during 2009, and subtract the honey that beekeepers exported. This final figure gives a nice picture of how much honey was used in the U.S. overall during 2009. That total figure is 363,754,996 pounds. If you divide that total figure by average the U.S. population for 2009, you get a handy figure to have ... per capita consumption, which is, for 2009 - .903 pounds, or right about 14.5 ounces. Did you eat your pound of honey last year?