First box about 60% full on each hive.

Second inspection of Hive A and Hive B, Saturday, 5/18/13:
This was day 14 for the hives, with the packages having been installed Saturday the 4th.  I was able to get my videographer out into the apiary with me, but it required a shocking amount of cajoling and pleading.  I have yet to edit and upload the video to YouTube.  In brief, I think that the hives are doing well and that the inspection went well.

It was much warmer for this inspection than the first (77 degrees versus 55 degrees for the first inspection).  I decided that I would be able to do a full inspection with no worries that I'd keep the hive open too long and chill brood.

I now seemed to have the hang of the smoker.  You might recall that I'm using wood shavings (bedding for small animals) found at Pet Expo.  There are no scents or chemicals added.  It is just simple cypress shavings, I believe.  I fill the smoker to the brim with this and seem to get at least 30 minutes of good smoke output.  It lasts the duration of the inspections, at least.

We smoked the entrance to Hive A.  I removed the log that weighs down the outer cover, and then removed that outer cover.  The pails were still quite full.  I hadn't yet put the labelled ones on the hives, and I lost track of which feeder pail was on which hive.  But, neither seemed to have taken any significant amount of 1:1 sugar syrup from the pail.  Each had at least 0.8 - 0.9 gallons left (out of a starting 1 gallon).  I put the pail to the side.  Again, with it having been one week, I wanted to replace the syrup with fresh.

I opened the inner cover.  It was not yet stuck down with propolis, but perhaps it was a bit harder to get up than it was a week ago.  We put a puff or two of smoke under the inner cover.  With the inner cover removed, the hive seemed pretty busy.  I don't recall how many frames had bees, but I did call out this information on the video so that I could record it on my inspection checklists.

Basically, the outer ~2 frames on each side were mostly untouched by the bees.  I had brought a second hive body for each hive, but ended up not needing them.  With luck and good weather and active bees, I will need them next week.

I proceeded to inspect each side of each frame.  Again, more details can be seen and heard on the video.  At some point, I may make my hive inspection checklists available on here if/when I can figure out how to upload PDF files.  Each hive seemed to have several sides of frames full of brood.  I think that I was able to tell the difference between capped honey (of which there was only a little) and brood.  The brood pattern of each hive was solid.  Any uncapped cells in the midst of the brood pattern had what appeared to be new larvae in them.  So, perhaps the bee that started out in that cell didn't make it and the queen came back along and placed new eggs in the gaps?

I still did not see eggs.  I assume that they were there somewhere.  In the places that I saw young larvae, I looked for eggs toward the outer edge of the frames.  But, I think that I am still worried about time and keeping my inspections brief.  So, I may have given up on finding eggs too soon.  In any event, the queens are seeming to be laying strong.

They hadn't eaten a lot more of the pollen patties.  I have been seeing the bees bringing in pollen over the week before, so I decided to toss the pollen patties off the hive and into the grass.  They are clearly getting pollen from other sources.  They had pollen stored on many of the frames.  I decided against adding new pollen patties.

Incidentally, when I was doing the inspections, I saw bees crawling across the frames with bright yellow pollen in their pollen baskets.  The pollen patties are a dull brown, so those bees must have been getting pollen elsewhere.  Likely dandelions as they are blooming all over lately.

I didn't see the queen of either hive.  But, I think my ability to do so will increase with time.

In the end, I closed up the hives and the bees were happy again.  Although, I would note that they seemed to be fine with the inspection, not overly upset.  No stings.  I'll end this post for now, and will update the blog when I have the next video uploaded to YouTube.