8/4 Gville hive inspection

Pink hive: decent number of bees, good brood pattern in med super, with some oddly grouped brood in the deep.  Plenty of capped honey and other food stores.  Spotted a queen in the deep.  She's a very pretty dark color.  This suggests she's less Italian than my other queen.  My understanding from Jerry Latner was that the hives I got from him were a mix of Italian and Caucasion, so perhaps she's more along the Caucasion line.  I wonder what she's been bred with?  Overall her brood pattern is relatively uneven, but she's still young - she's only been laying for 3 weeks at most, so hopefully this will improve.

Worth noting that this hive continues to have a concerning number of beetles.

Also worth noting that even though I haven't fed these bees in well over a month and it's now August which should be relatively short on nectar flow in this area I did see a good amount of uncapped honey and noticed some shake out of water even with gentle manipulation.  This suggests they're still collecting nectar from somewhere.

While I had the deep open I moved some of the wooden/large cell frames toward the outside of the box in favor of moving some of my small-cell frames in toward the brood area of the box.  As I do this I'm trying to avoid breaking up the brood pattern as much as possible.

Hill hive: this hive is PACKED with bees and doing wonderfully with both brood and food stores.  Didn't spot the queen, but I'm not surprised given the sheer mass of bees in this hive.  Because of the dense population I was concerned for swarming, so I made sure to check for swarm cells.  To my pleasant surprise I found no signs of queen cells on or under the frames in either box.  Since this hive seems to be doing well and have plenty of food supply, I decided to throw a medium on top w/ nine frames to see if they'll draw comb.  Hopefully they will so that I might get some honey from them this fall.  Will continue to monitor this hive for signs of queen cells, if they show up and the hive continues to otherwise do so well, I'm inclined to split this hive and forfeit a chance at honey this fall... I'll let the bees decide which to do.