drumroll please

he opened up the hives a few days ago to take a look~  this is the new hive, already filling up with frames of capped honey and swimming with bees, bees, bees.

one very important bee in particular.  he found her.  among all those thousands and thousands of bees, he found the new queen.  the queen in our other hive came marked with a yellow dot (you can see her in all her royal glory on the cover of this magazine) and so she is fairly easy to spot.  we really weren't sure if we'd find this new queen, and I admit I felt a tad discouraged as we scanned frame after frame and I counted them down in the back of my mind....... but yes ma'am, they reared a beautiful, viable, fertile and lovely queen.

she's the one with the very long abdomen.  the one, perhaps obviously, that he's pointing to.  the big one to the right of his finger is a drone, there are several of them in this picture.  most of them, however, are female worker bees.

and there we have it.  we are officially back to two healthy and thriving hives.