Ideally, the start of The Bee-Long Project should coincide with the Swarming season, which may begin towards the end of March or beginning of April, depending on the weather and location.
The Bee-Long Project has had a donation of 4 hives and four colonies as a starting point as well as an offer of land on which to site some hives.
The Bee-Long Project has already been asked for 3 colonies in 2 days
"Beekeeping now has the dubious honor of becoming the first part of our system of industrial agriculture to actually fall apart. Let’s stop pretending that something else is going on. We no longer have enough bees to pollinate our crops. Each time the bees go through a downturn, we respond by making things more stressful for them, rather than less--we move them around more often, expose them to still more toxic substances, or fill the equipment up again with more untested and poorly adapted stock. We blame the weather, the mites, the markets, new diseases, consumers, the Chinese, the Germans, the (fill in your favorite scapegoat), other beekeepers, the packers, the scientific community, the price of gas, global warming--anything rather than face up to what’s really happening. We are losing the ability to take care of living things."- -Kirk Webster