Another Look at Hive #1

It's been 6 days since I combined the two hives and with the weather warm and sunny, I figured it was a good day to check to see how things have been going with the merger. I was pretty sure that the bees had long ago chewed through the sheet of newspaper that divided them and having seen nothing to indicate open warfare, I really had a couple of other things I wanted to do once in the hive, though I was curious to see the extent to which they had intermingled.
The first thing, as always, was to check the status of the queen. By now, new bees have been chewing their way out of their capped cells for about 10 days and her majesty should have been revisiting those cells to lay new eggs. Conservatively, ten days of emerging bees could equal an additional 10 to 15 thousand bees I figured. With the Texas merger , I could be looking at 30 to 35 thousand bees by now in hive #1. That of course is a semi-educated guess. I wasn't going to be counting!
I was also interested to see how they had been doing getting additional frames drawn out in the lower hive box and if the queen had begun laying eggs in the upper hive box. I had used the inner cover at the top of the hive to provide an entrance to the transplanted Texas girls under the hive top feeder. Many of them had imprinted on this opening and seemed to use it instead of the main entrance at the bottom of the hive. Though merged, I had no way of knowing if any Texas bees were using the lower entrance, or if the Georgia girls used the upper. If you're not a bee, they look amazingly alike. I figured that the Texans were probably working mostly in the upper hive box and the Georgians in the lower. The logic being that old habits die hard, especially for an insect.
Between the nectar flow and the syrup in the feeder, I hoped that they had expanded onto the unused frames in the upper box as well. I've come around to the idea that, in this first year, it is more important to get all the frames drawn out into comb than to worry too much about honey. Fully drawn comb means a better infrastructure to support more bees in the long run. This, in turn, increases their survival chances for the winter through a larger population and more room for food storage. If the hive does not survive the winter - a sad outcome after all this nurturing! - I will have fully drawn frames to hand over to a new package next year. They won't have to waste time and energy on constructing comb and instead can get right to work making baby bees and honey.
Well, with all this in mind, I set about smoking the little critters and opened things up piece by piece to have a look-see. The first thing I noticed after pulling a couple of non-drawn frames in the upper was that they had made short work of the newspaper. All that remained was a 2-3 inch fringe around the outsides of the hive. The upper box contained about six frames almost fully drawn out that contained mostly nectar and pollen. There were patches of capped brood scattered around that I believe tended to be drone brood because they protruded out a few millimeters beyond the rest of the cells. The patches tended to be around 2 to 3 inches in diameter and were not in any particular pattern on the frames. Could this mean laying workers? The queen was alive and well in the lower box and she seemed to be doing fairly well in keeping the cells occupied with brood down there. But I wasn't sure I saw evidence that she had been at work in the upper box. The Georgians had not done much in expanding onto the 3 frames they had not touched before, but the seven frames that were fully drawn out were heavy with bees, brood, pollen and honey. Most of the progress in drawing out comb had occured in the upper box. I decided to try to rectify that by moving two drawn out frames that were full of nectar and pollen to the lower box, replacing two of the lightly drawn frames down there, which I moved upstairs. In this way I hoped to get the bees to fully invest the lower box and only after that would I work to get the upper box's frames completely drawn out.
I am a little worried about the possibility of laying workers in the upper box. Will the queen and a laying worker coexist? Can a worker who has begun to lay eggs continue doing so after she is introduced to a hive with a functioning queen and her pheromones? I think for my next inspection, I'll need to have my mentor on hand to help me interpret what I'm seeing. Things seem to be going generally well, but I have nagging feelings that I may be missing some vital clues for things that could have an undesirable effect down the road.
One of the guys I met while in class, who was a second year beekeeper, said that he found it easier to take digital pictures of each frame during inspection and then he could review them at a more leisurely pace at his computer rather than making quick interpretations at the hive itself. Having been through a couple of inspections now, I think his method is an excellent one.
The other benefit to this is that I can show pictures to other bee people and thus get other opinions without having to troop them to my hives. I see a digital camera in my near future!
On a separate note, I have been surprised to find a slight up-tick in the bee's aggressiveness in the past couple of days. The vast majority remain too busy to pay me any mind, but I've sustained two more stings in the past two days from single bees who have gotten it into their little heads that I am a pin cushion for planting their business ends. Ironically, both stings occurred, like the one mentioned in my last posting, while I was sitting a short distance from the hive, watching them do their thing. Out of nowhere, individual bees came barreling straight at me to plant their little darts into (a) my finger and (b) my back.
If only the little buggers could understand...I'm only here to help! Sadly, they don't, and so our tally grows...

...Sting count, to date: 6