Spring has sprung in Eastern Ontario. An early spring: we’re about six weeks ahead of last year and the ladies are loving it. This was the scene at one hive just after noon today:

The dandelions are in full bloom right now and the foragers are bringing in masses of pollen from them and what appear to be a few other sources. Plus, they’re nectar-filling comb at an incredible rate as well. Amazing.

We’ve been extremely lucky with our surviving hives. Two out of the three are highly typical Buckfast: incredibly gentle and diligent workers. Last weekend, we had my Cub pack out for a visit (more on that in another post) and not only were there no stings or worries, we spent most of the time in the hive without veils or gloves. We’re back to what we’re calling Rasta Bees® in our yards: when we open the lid, they simply don’t care that we’re there.

The queen has been raising brood for about a month already and there are loads of drones flying about, so we went out today to make a split. In a lot of ways, the thought of splitting a hive in May 2 in our area is insane. But there’s brood on half the bars in the hive and a very high percentage of drones, so why not? There’s no shortage of forage and pollen and looking at the pictures from our first installs two years ago, the foliage on June 8 2008, was about equal to April 17 this year.

The buildup process has begun. Donor hives can be split every couple of weeks and the splits can become donors after 5-6 weeks. By Greg’s calculations, starting with three donor hives, splitting them every two weeks and moving the splits into the process when they’re ready, we’ll be in the range of 30 hives by mid-July.

Anyway, talking to your neighbours. After we finished with the split and watched the comings and goings for a bit, we wound up talking to a neighbour across the road from this yard. He absolutely loves the bees and the fact that they’re there. He’s also offered his 56 acres if we’re looking for more locations. The really funny part is that after talking to him we were going out to scout another location that we’d been offered. Now, we need some bees to put in there.