Busy bees

The bees are busy! Still sucking down sugar syrup and building comb like crazy. We have been adding boxes to the hives as they fill up with bees and capped brood. The hives now have three brood boxes each. (The top box is a feeder box.)

These three boxes will be where the queen hangs out – laying eggs, making more bees. In a week or two, when the third brood box is full of bees, we will start adding honey supers to the top of the hives. We'll add a queen excluder between the brood boxes and honey supers to keep the queen from laying eggs in the honey. I don't know about you, but I like my honey to be larvae-free. 
Here's a frame of bees, with some capped brood and some open comb that new bees have already emerged from:

During our inspection today, we saw both queens. The queens are much larger than the other bees and their abdomens sort of shine, making them stand out in their crowd of bees. Here's Ramona's Queen:

And Beezus' queen, who was a little camera shy:

After our inspection today we built 6 more boxes and frames to fill them all. We are ready for the rest of the season. Bring on the honey!