Joanna makes several good points. 3 weeks is on the "low end" for modern
Catt hybrids, but not totally outside the norm. She's also correct that a
bigger, more mature plant will give better performance than a youngster or
small division.

She's also right about shows being stressful on the plants, but vastly
understates the case on that one! Before the orchids get to the "not-ideal"
environment, they have to travel; and once they get there, they get way too
much handling, mostly by folks who have no idea HOW to handle an orchid ...
Kenni


A cattleya lasting 3 weeks may just be normal for this individual plant.
Catts' flowers don't last nearly as long as Phal flowers. Maybe it will
stay in bloom longer the next time it flowers though -- I find with one of
my catts that it seems to alternate between a good flowering season and a
mediocre one (two seasons in one year) so far, I don't know how typical
this is, though. How old/young is your blc? If it is a small plant, close
to seedling size, its flowering season is likely to get longer in the
future as it matures. Also how long have you had this Blc? If you got it
in spike and this is the blooming that just happened and lasted 3 weeks,
it may be that it still needs to acclimate to your environment which is
bound to be different from the greenhouse where it probably used to live.
Especially if you bought it at an orchid show, I think shows tend to
stress out orchids quite a lot (since it's not an ideal environment and
there is a lot of environment changes that are not gradual), so they need
to recover from that, and as a result a shorter blooming season is not
unusual at that point.