Conducting a Recount

This week I cut down my daffodils, counting as I cut.  The grand total:  460.  What?  460?  But my daffs have been declining for the past few years:

2009: 347
2010: 282
2011: 175
2012:  460

I was so surprised by the number, that I pulled all the stems out of the compost pile and counted them again.  Yep:  460.

Last fall I dug up some of the clumps and replanted them.  I didn't expect that to do much to change the daff count this year, since the too-crowded bulbs would have already formed whatever flowers they were going to form for this year.  So I thought I wouldn't see any change in flowering until next year.

Boy, was I wrong!  But I'm still not sure why there are so many more this year.  When I dug up the daff clumps (yielding 200 bulbs of assorted sizes), I replanted them starting with the largest, 20-25 per section replanted (for a total of 150; the other 50 went to Mom).  And here you can see the nice performance of the two sections that got the largest bulbs:

 
The third replanted section had only one flower, as I expected.  The fourth section (planted in the front lower border, not pictured) also had one flower.  The rest didn't flower (I didn't expect them to; those bulbs were tiny!)

So my replantings don't account for the (nearly) 300-flower increase in production this year.  Those as-yet-to-be-divided clumps really ramped up their output, with no help from me.  For comparison, here's a photo I posted last year of the same area as in the top pic:

I have no idea what the cause of this bloom-fest was, but I'm grateful!