I'm in North Carolina, and our weather pattern has been similar to yours. March was warmer here (mostly low 50s), but still cooler than usual. April began with a blast of heat (upper 80s to around 90), and we're just now beginning to see actual spring-like temps in the 60s and 70s. My earliest rabbiteyes began blooming in late February, and several of my Southern Highbush quickly followed. I didn't begin to see any active bees until late March, and then only a few. Nonetheless, I definitely have a lot of developing berries, so pollination doesn't seem to have been a problem. As was discussed in other recent thread, bumblebees are very efficient, and one can pretty much take care of an entire bush in a very short span of time. So, I wouldn't count your early bloomers out. There might have been a few active bees here and there that you didn't see.

Thanks, shazaam. That's good to hear. I had to hand-pollinate squash last year so that was contributing to my pessimism. I sure hope a bee or two has found the bushes!

Here in Madison, WI, it is bumblebees that do most of the pollinating of our blueberry shrubs. The weather is still too cool for honeybees when the blueberries are in bloom, but the bumblebees can operate in 60 degree temps. The shrubs should hold their blossoms for two or three weeks, so there is a chance the bees will show up in time for you.

I put up a Mason Bee house up about a month ago and have started to see them building nests. I won't know for a while whether they have helped the pollination process but it was a rather low-cost and painless process of adding the bee house. This might be something to consider for your blueberry plants.

I live in NC, and I definitely saw my carpenter bees early this year, so you might want to attract them with untreated wood they can bore into. Now I've seen all kinds of bees and yellowjackets already.

As far as flowers that bloom, I have some very early version of spirea they like, and I stopped pulling out all of a minty purple-flowered weed I have because they really liked it. It's a pretty weed, lol. It just gets tall later. My rosemaries didn't bloom this year (transplanted last year), but bees love those, too. They were blooming at a vineyard I visited a couple of weeks ago.

Right now my bees are insane for the creeping charlie with purple flowers and the white clover. It sounds silly, but I'll be happy to send anyone some of these through the mail. My bees like the weeds better than most cultivated plants early in the year :)

I have noticed that our bumblebees are all over the creeping charlie in the lawn, early in the season, when nothing else is blooming. Since we rely on the bumblebees to pollinate the blueberries, I have slowly developed a better attitude toward creeping charlie, and I no longer try to eradicate it.