Death of unopened flowers in cattleyas
 

Hello everyone:
I need advice on the flowering of cattleyas. In this summer season my plants are aborting the flowers and I don't know what it can be; of four I achieve one, of two one, and it is happening to me with almost all those that are opening pods. I put pictures of how the unopened flower begins to die. This has me very disappointed, I have read a lot and I can't find the cause, maybe someone has gone through the same thing and can clarify what is happening. I have been cultivating cattleyas for more than five years and it is the first time I have seen this. I appreciate the help you can give me. Greetings.

Here the photos I forgot to put

I imagine this probably isn’t the case for you, but if one of my Phalaenopsis or Oncidium types with bad root health decides to bloom anyway, this happens. But, it’s usually all he flowers that fail. How are the roots on your plants?

My plants are fine, those that are in the flowering season are those that are presenting this problem, so I could find it may be an excess of water, they are outside and although I protect them, they may have received a lot of rain.

I had this issue with one of my Cattleya that was apparently caused by too much light. Moving the plant to a slightly dimmer location gave me a successful bloom.

That could be because they receive a lot of light and with the yellow ones this has not happened to me, now two are opening the pod, one is yellow and the other orange, as these require a lot of light, I will not move to see what It happens, I know that the red and pink ones that have opened have done it wrong. If this is the cause, I could solve it, thank you very much for your help.

And how is the color pattern of the blooms? Does it looks like "damaged", with color breaks and streaks?
Something like the example bellow:

http://www.rv-orchidworks.com/orchid...ds-virus-1.jpg

Ouch... that color break sure looks like virus. A lot of the flaws that people see on leaves are very likely to be other things like bacterial or fungal infection. But color break like this in a Cattleya flower has "virus" written all over it. Isolate it , and test it - if positive, throw away. The blasting buds in the original post are likely to have other causes, probably environmental. But this flower looks bad.

Roberta, that's not a plant of mine. Just an example taken from the web so that Merita understands what I'm trying to say.:)

Oh, I am very glad! That one looks awful.