Successful Smoking

The first step in my hive check process is to get my smoker fuel well-prepared and lit: few things are as frustrating as cracking the hive open and then finding that your smoker has gone out. People use all kinds of materials for smoker fuel: cotton, cardboard roles, pellets of compressed wood, etc. The combination that works well for me is a slip of burlap, lit and dropped into a 'nest' of ponderosa pine needles. If I'm going to do a thorough hive inspection, I'll fill my smoker all the way up with pine needles to ensure it'll stay lit through the whole process.
Use the smoke judiciously: three or four puffs of 'cool' smoke (i.e. no sparks!) through the hive entrance as you begin, then three or four more puffs per hive body as you work your way through the boxes.
With some gentle smoke, the bees will start gorging themselves on honey- you'll see a bunch of workers with their heads stuffed into a honey cell. The evolutionary mechanism at work here is that the smoking mimics a wildfire, compelling the bees to load up on honey to transfer to a new home if the fire approaches a hive's tree.