I checked the hives today to see whether the requeening of the eastern hive was complete. This is the first time I’ve had to open the hives by myself. Things went fine.
The queen cage was empty, and I didn’t see evidence of any swarm cells or a dead queen out on the front porch, so I removed the queen cage and checked some of the center frames on the upper brood deep, and they are full of capped brood (left by the old queen) and getting pretty full of uncapped honey, too.
We probably should not have put both honey supers on the hives at the same time; I think that the bees are a little confused working with all the new real estate, and aren’t able to focus on building out comb on just one super. In the western hive, where they are at full strength, this is probably not of issue; they need the space, and they’ve got the workforce to handle it. It might slow them a little at first, but they’ve proven to be awesome workers. In the eastern hive, I am concerned that they are not at full strength until the new bees are born, and until then, they have to split their time between two supers. Oh well. Bon chance.
The eastern hive seems to be doing as well as could be expected. I did not see the queen, but of course the upper deep is pretty much honey storage at this point. I will check again in a week, looking for eggs laid in a nice tight queen pattern.
The western hive seems to be really rocking. The center 3 frames I inspected (looking for swarm cells or a ton of capped brood) were all pretty much full of honey. The supers had hundreds of bees on each of the center three frames, drawing out comb. The hive looks full and busy.
On we go. Full inspection in a week.