9/15 - today's inspection

I checked up on both of my Gainesville hives today.  I've got good news and less good news.

Pink hive - as of my last inspection, four weeks ago, this hive appeared to be making a come back.  Overall the population is up.  They still have capped honey stores and plenty of food.  There remains a fair amount of capped brood and even some nice, fat larvae that are yet to be capped.  The thing that concerns me is that I didn't see any eggs or really young larvae.  I also didn't see the queen, but that doesn't mean much.  Now, I did this inspection before the sun was well up in the sky, so perhaps I just didn't have the right lighting conditions to see eggs and small larvae...  though I did observe what appeared to be a capped queen cell in among some drone brood on the bottom side of one of the frames in the medium super.  Additionally this hive seemed a little "buzzy" and I've heard from experienced bee keepers that over time you get to where you can detect a queen-less hive based on its sound.  So maybe that's what I'm hearing, or maybe this is just my own weird confirmation bias :)

Plan: I'll give them two weeks and if they're not clearly back on track I'll give them a frame of brood from my hill hive.

Hill hive - This hive is still going awesome.  They've not only pulled comb in more than half of the honey super, but they've actually started storing honey in there!  This means they're pulling nectar in from the environs and doing very well at it.  I'm extremely optimistic that I'll be able to harvest some honey this fall.

As for the rest of the hive, it's boiling with bees.  They still have plenty of capped honey and wall-to-wall brood on a number of the medium frames in the upper portion of the brood box.  If anything my only concern is that this hive is getting overpopulated and may swarm, but I saw no indications of swarm cells.  So hopefully they'll stay put.

Plan: next inspection I should be prepared for two things- 1) there's a chance these bees will take another honey super this fall and 2) I need to bring a couple deep, small-cell frames as this hive is ready to start having the large cell stuff removed.

Last note: both of my Gville hives have lots of beetles.  The beetle traps seem to help, but I'd really like to get ahead of the population.  I think I'll try nematoads again (I'll be quicker with spreading them this time, last time I think most of them died in my fridge)