Bees are doing great! I watched a demo at Glory Bee today (where I get my bees) and they stated explicitly that they felt shaking all the bees out was much better than "gentle releases" like in the video where he puts the package in the hive and let's them move into the frames on their own time.
I did what they told me to do which is take out all but two frames (and the frame feeder I'm using), put those two frames in the middle of the deep, and then shake the bees out into the hive. Slowly/gently put all the frames back in. Leave the package on the ground near the hive and the stragglers will find their way in. The only thing I didn't like is that they said to leave the inner cover off and put the top cover on kitty-corner for a few hours until they all go down in between the frames, but when I came back to put the inner cover and telescoping top on, there were a lot of them balled up under the top and still sitting on top of the frames which made it hard to get the inner cover and top on without squishing bees......I waited until dusk and went back to put the inner cover and top on. They were still kind of sitting on top, but when I slowly lowered the inner cover on top of them they moved out of the way--same thing with the top. They also failed to mention to be sure to hang the queen cage so that the screened side is facing out so that they can feed her until the eat through the candy--I didn't check that when I hung her cage and I was afraid I might have hung her cage wrong, so I had to reach in and pull her cage back out to be sure. The bees weren't super happy about that, but they didn't seem to hostile--though a lot of them did crawl on my hands (I was wearing my gloves) and when I got back to the house there were 2 or 3 stingers stuck in my leather gloves...... :-D
So, I just check on them tomorrow (just looking from the outside) and then wait 2-3 days before checking in the hive to make sure the queen is out and then remove her cage.
Thanks for all the well-wishes, this has been a lot of fun and I'm just getting started!
NP