I do that. Sometimes with the a stethoscope and sometimes just pressing my ear against the hive. I've done it since I was a kid and the bees were my dad's, so I've got a lot of bee-listening experience. I know a fellow who had a laying-worker hive in his busy, packed bee-yard and I suprised myself by picking it out from several yards away, as he was leading us over to have a peer at it. It sang a different note.
You can definately tell between 'we have nothing to do' and 'we are happy and making honey' and 'we are queenless or have a disease or something made us angry recently' and 'we are about to swarm.'
With the 'scope you can locate the cluster's position in the hive in the winter without opening it, and that'll give you a guess how much of their stores they have eaten without you needing to open the hive.
Another fun sensory beekeeping experience is to try to smell the breath off your hives. Each will have its unique 'body odor' and you may also find you can tell if honey is being made, and they have much brood. You should enjoy an animal-fur smell reminescent of a clean mink coat, plus a hint of lemon-grass (nasonov pheromone) plus a teak-hinting-vanilla woody scent (this is the smell of queen-rightness, queen mandibular pheromone and retinue pheromone are chemically similar to the benzoin perfume-fixative that this smell somewhat resembles). You are of course familiar with the floral-acidy-sweet smell of honey-production, and the resin-smells of your local propolis. The presence of a lot of brood adds a milk/cream odor to the mix. A healthy productive hive smells wonderful. Aside from being enjoyable, smelling the stream of ventilated air from the hives is also good practice because if you take note of the normal smell you will immediately notice if there is mould, wax-moth, or foulbrood.
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