Can't Make Connection Pooling Wotk

I've been beating my head against the wall form two days now trying to get connection pooling to work. I'm using Spring 3 & Hibernate 4. Here's the basic setup:

Code:

---

      <bean id='sharedPoolingProperties' class='com.jolbox.bonecp.BoneCPDataSource'
                                destroy-method="close" abstract='true'>
            <property name="idleMaxAgeInSeconds" value="60"/>
            < ... >
            </bean>
   
        <bean id='dataSource' parent='sharedPoolingProperties'>
                        <property name="driverClass" value="com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" />
                <property name="jdbcUrl" value="..." />
                <property name='username' value='...' />
                <property name='password' value='...' />
        </bean>
        <bean id="sessionFactory" class="org.springframework.orm.hibernate4.LocalSessionFactoryBean">
                <property name="dataSource" ref="dataSource" />
                <property name="configLocation" value='classpath:hibernate.cfg.xml' />
                <property name='entityInterceptor'>
                        <bean class='org.tabbysplace.checkout.hibernate.entityInterceptor' />
                </property> 

              <property name="hibernateProperties">
                      . . .
              </property>
          </bean>

---

I have a two minute connection timeout on my test DB. But after my first successful DB connection, all further attempts fail saying the familiar

ERROR: org.hibernate.engine.jdbc.spi.SqlExceptionHelper - Communications link failure
The last packet successfully received from the server was 273,875 m...

I also tried with c3p0, but the same thing occurs.

I must be doing something fundamentally wrong, but I don't know what.

Any help appreciated.