first bee check

this afternoon baldman and i did our first inspection of the hive. we couldn't find the queen, but i'm fairly certain she's there. the point is to find the queen (or signs of her) to make sure she's laying eggs and doing her job. we noticed a few hive beetle. i'll keep an eye on that. the bees were definitely working, though. they'd laid comb in a few of the outer frames. so we rotated frames to keep the middle full. hopefully they'll move out as they fill it up. at first i didn't see any eggs. they're so minuscule, it's just so hard to see them. especially when there's thousands of bees covering everything. but we removed some stray burr comb and when i looked closer at that i'm almost certain there were eggs in there. i figure i'll check back in a week to see if there are any more signs. but so far so good.

here are a few picts of the inspection:


is he not the cutest!?


taking out the frames


if you look closely, you can actually see where they've laid the comb


bzzzzz


the burr comb. if you blow this picture up big enough, you can actually see what i'm fairly certain are eggs. (how 'bout them blue nails?)