Well, that changes things...Part 1

So, Thursday night my city council passed a new package of animal ordinances.  In between outlawing tethering dogs and requiring registration of your cat they passed an ordinance that says that beehives must be kept 300' from the property line.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you need more room to have bees than to have horses (only 100' required).  They basically looked at a nearby city and copied their asinine ban verbatim.  This was passed without discussion or input from any beekeepers in the city.  Luckily, hives that are already established when the ordinance goes into effect will be grandfathered in and won't be subject to the setbacks.  Even more luckily, the ordinance doesn't go into effect for another week.  So, I took the logical approach of splitting everything I could to get my hive numbers up before the ordinance goes into effect.

Fortunately, in the case of emergency equipment needs, there is a shop about an hour from my house.  Today, I ran over and grabbed enough equipment to cobble together two more hives.  I also lucked out and he had a couple of spare queens.  I took a couple of frames of brood from the white hive and gave them one of the queens.  They are in a full sized hive, but will be moved into half of a resource hive when the order I placed last night comes in.

I decided to split the green hive evenly.  One deep for each half.  This was partly due to their strength and partly due to the fact that I really needed boxes on stands.  This was the bottleneck today because the queen decided that today was the best day ever to play hide-n-seek.  It took close to an hour to find her.  Once I did, she remained on the old stand and the other half of the bees and resources were moved to a new stand and given the other queen.

In other happenings, I'm starting to see foragers coming from the nuc that was split off of the white hive, so that's encouraging.  The holly bush is buzzing with bees and the clover is just barely starting to bloom here and there.  The spiderwort is blooming, but the bees either haven't found it or prefer the holly.