Popped in for a look today since the weather was cooperating (it poured oceans yesterday) and found all kinds of great things. I SAW THE QUEEN! Totally cool! She's Carniolan so she's almost all black and among all the Italian workers, she stood right out. She's been a busy monarch. I saw eggs, larvae and capped brood. Fantastic. The larvae are a nice white like they should be. There's lots of pollen and either nectar or most likely sugar syrup. We had my hubby's son with us and he got to take a good look at everything too. Even got to see a big clumsy drone as he lumbered along a frame. There's just nothing like seeing these things for the first time outside of the books. They are starting to draw out the outer 4 frames as well. We will give them another week or so and add another deep. The feeder still has syrup in it and I'm not sure how much longer to leave it on and keep filling it. I filled it most of the way up last week and it's still about half full. It's one of the hive-top feeders.
We did take a quick look at the other hive (that was the established swarm) and found that the super we left on is now absolutely FULL of capped honey. Amazing. We had put another super on the very top with the queen excluder 2 weeks ago. It is a brand new box with only new foundation in the frames. They haven't started drawing out the comb at all. There are bees milling around in there, but not doing anything. Is there a reason they haven't started drawing out the foundation? What, if anything, should we do? :?: