We installed a package from Georgia in one hive in April. Then in May we installed a "nuc" from a local breeder here in DC.
Today we opened up the "Dixie Chicks", and they have been aggressively building out their comb and brood. They are so populous we're actually thinking of splitting them. Today we put on a super with a queen excluder, so we can take some honey. Our goal isn't to get honey... our goal is survival of their first winter. So we don't want to take too much. We didn't go in too far, because we really liked what we saw. Sooooo many bees. The two deeps were packed full of them!
We didn't even look for a queen... there's plenty of evidence that this is one really vigorous, healthy, productive hive. It was chock full of bees.
In this picture you can see the honey in the upper left, and larvae pretty much everywhere else. You can see them curled up in their cells in various sizes. The really little ones might be 3-4 days old. The ones that are nearly filling the cell might be a week or so old. As they get large enough, they're getting capped with the white toasty stuff.
Second, we opened up "All Mighty Pollinators" (the locals). They have been slower to build out comb, but we saw the queen, and we saw brood actually hatching. They were trucking along but they didn't seem to be as concerned about expanding into the nearby frames. Our hives are 8-frame langstroth bodies, and the nuc was 5 frames. They had built up comb on maybe 2 of the 3 frames we added.
Here is a picture of the queen of the All Mighty Pollinators. She's busy laying eggs in this frame. You can see the little teeny eggs standing up in the bottom of the dark cells below her The eggs are hatching into larvae where the cells appear wet and shiny on the lower right. The really shiny cells on the left side of the picture are full of honey.
Jen inspects one of the nuc frames with quite a bit of capped brood. This hive should be growing much more quickly in the next couple weeks.