Obviously that's not me in the video above! But if you watch, you'll see pretty much what we saw when we opened the hive for our first real inspection this week.

To recap (that's a pun in beespeak): We hived our nuc colony two weeks ago. We didn't get a great look at the frames at the time, as the priority was simply to move the frames (which were even more crowded with bees than the ones in the video, because it was early in the morning and everybody was still home) into the hive, get the feeder situated on top so that they would have sugar water supplements to help them settle in, and then close up the hive and leave the girls to themselves to adjust.

One thing was quite clear, though: In the middle of the five nuc frames was a queen cage. When queens are introduced to a colony, they have to be protected in a cage so that their pheromones have time to reach the workers and they can decide to accept her. During this time, workers begin feeding her and attending her through the wires of the cage, and other workers nibble on a candy plug closing up one end of the cage. By the time they eat all the candy, the queen will have taken pheromonal control of the hive, and she will be free to walk out of the cage and take up residence. Without the cage and the adjustment period, the workers would kill the queen. But the presence of the queen cage in the hive is itself an issue, as it interferes with the spacing between frames, and bees build up burr comb around it.

All of which is to say that ten days ago, we opened the hive very briefly to make sure the queen had been released (sometimes you have to unplug the cage yourself with an unwound paper clip) and to get the queen cage out. We were delighted with what we found--Victoria was out and about, the cage was empty, and the bees had drawn out lots of burr comb around the cage. I stuck my hand into the heart of the nest (yes, gloved), lifted out the queen cage, and gently tore out the burr comb. Then I pushed the frames back together, and again we got out of there fast. Later, inspecting the burr comb (pure gorgeous beeswax drawn out in perfect hexagons), we saw tiny bee eggs deep in the cells: proof that our queen was in good shape and had already begun laying.

But we were still in the dark about what was really happening in the hive, and had to wait a week before going in again. Bees don't love having their nests disrupted, and they lose time with their gathering and breeding when you inspect them, so blocks of time have to pass between entries. So we were patient. And Wednesday afternoon, we went in.

The bees were plentiful and calm, unlike the day we hived them, when they were understandably annoyed at multiple recent disruptions--being put into a cardboard box, with a strange new queen, and transported to a field overnight to wait for pickup; then getting picked up and driven to a new location; then getting hived by us. We took our time, and drew out each frame, one by one, looked them over, and took pictures. Photos are invaluable, because it is very hard to see in real time what you need to see when inspecting a hive: you need to find the queen to make sure she's alive, but she's hidden among thousands of bees that look a lot like her; you need to check for consistency of brood pattern and look for eggs, which are practically microscopic; you need to look for signs of trouble, like patchy brood pattern, or mites. And you have to do it all fast, but also in slow motion to keep the bees calm. And even when they are being gentle, they do get curious about you and they fly all around you and land on you and it can make you worry just a little bit.

At one point, I was positive one had flown up the leg of my pants. I had my hands full of a frame filled with brood and honey and thousands of bees and I could not just drop it and dance around in a panic. So I had to pretty much let that bee keep traveling and take my chances. I did not get stung, and in shaking my leg out after replacing the frame, I did not see a bee exit. So maybe it was all imagined. I will never know!

Anyway. While the frames were crowded and busy, we couldn't see well at all. We couldn't find the queen. We could not see eggs because the bees were covering over the cells and moving so much. We struggled! But when we got inside and looked at the pictures, all was revealed. In one shot of a frame that looks very much like the one in the video above, we saw a long, lean bee with a blue marker on her back. Long live the queen! In others, we spotted cells filled with larvae--hatched eggs on their way to becoming capped brood. So we had good confirmation that the queen is alive and well, that she's laying like crazy, and that all looks well in the hive. We also saw some capped honey stores just like in the video above.

So far so good. Next inspection: middle of next week.