My son and I did our first inspection of our two new hives.  Hive 1 looks pretty good with lots of capped brood and we found a healthy queen running around.  Hive 2, on the other hand, seems a lot less populated and we couldn't find the queen.  Only 3 of the frames in Hive 2 are drawn with comb (about 5 are drawn in hive 1).

Hive 2 was so tame that I was able to work with it without smoking the bees or a head net on.

Hive 2 has some drone cells, couldn't find the queen.

Hive 2 (the one I couldn't find a queen) does have some capped brood.

Hive 1 has a healthy queen and a lot of capped brood in a nice pattern.

Hive 1

Nearby spectators

The point of the first inspection is to see how well the hives are doing.  Do they have a queen? Any diseases? Is there capped brood?  I didn't get stung and in fact it was a lot easier than I thought.  It was the first time I'd ever used a smoker.  I waited 9 days from the time I got the starter hives to do the inspection in order to give them time to settle in.  I plan to do another inspection next weekend depending on the weather to see how hive 2 is progressing (I probably won't mess with hive 1 since it's clearly doing fine).

This week I should also be receiving a Nuc from the SEMBA President (who's also a Canton police officer which is pretty cool).  I don't know how many hives I'll have eventually. If I could, I'd go with 4 or 5 hives total for this year. 

I was surprised how much I sweated doing this. The bee hat stuff really makes the sweat go.  But for now, I was just thankful I didn't get stung.