Yesterday evening we opened up the hive to take a first look at how they're settling in. It looks good in there. They've begun making use of all 4 of the empty frames they got when we installed them into the hive body. There are healthy looking larva and plenty of capped brood, even on some of the new frames, so the queen has clearly been busy. We haven't seen her yet, but with all the evidence of her activity we're not worried.

This year we interleaved the additional frames with the 5 from the nuc, which isn't what what the books recommend (mostly they say to keep the existing frames in exactly the same pattern that they come in), but seems to be encouraging them to spread throughout the hive body better than last year. They had covered the frames they had densely enough that we added the second hive body. It's frames are just undrawn foundation, but if the spring keeps up like it has so far they should be drawing those out soon.

This afternoon, the weather was perfect and they were, well, busy as bees.