It's D-Day

Today is the day that the new local ordinances go into effect.  As of today, I have 5 "production" hives and 2 nuc/resources hives.  That means I have bees in 7 boxes with two empty slots for preventing swarms and doing other beework.  I've printed out these same pictures and had them notarized just in case I need to prove that the hives were established when the ordinance went into effect.

The outyard hives

The backyard hives

I'll admit that this really irritated me.  It was snuck in without any discussion.  It's like they thumbed through a neighboring city's laws and picked out the ones that looked good.  They could have at least looked at the laws in another neighboring city that say that hives must be kept 25' from the property line OR have a flyaway and the beekeeper must provide a water source.  At least they grandfathered in existing hives.  I've voiced my displeasure to the council member who pushed it and invited him to the house to see the hives.  He accepted, but doesn't seem to be in much hurry to make the time to do it.

Well, that changes things....Part 2

Sometimes the beehaving gods smile down on you.  Today was one of those days.  The outyard hive has finally gained enough population that I don't feel like complete crap for splitting them.  The queen and half the resources were placed on a new stand right next to the old stand.  One thing I did try to do was give the queenright half some empty comb so she has somewhere to lay and give the queenless half most of the eggs and young larvae.  At very least, the queenright half will need another deep when it comes in, but I've ordered enough for all of them to have double deeps.

So, the tally is as follows:  There are now two outyard hives, both in a single deep box.  The backyard has one nuc, one single deep that will be a nuc, two single deep hives, and a double deep hive.  Once all of the new equipment comes in and gets painted, I'll figure out how to name them to keep them straight.

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.