Jon

A fortnight ago I went down to the home place to mark queens for my father. He has 12 colonies and I managed to find and mark 8 of his queens. There was one colony of very runny bees full of brood but I couldn't find the queen even after going through the box a second time. The box had a load of brace comb as it was one frame short.
When we had finished up, he noticed that the bees in this colony were running around on the front of the box like a queenless hive. I suspected that the queen may have had a mishap during the manipulations to remove the brace comb but I put it to the back of my mind.
Today, 15 days on, I took another run out with the idea of marking the queens I had missed the last time.
I started with the box full of runny bees and the first two brood frames I checked only had a bit of sealed brood. I then heard a queen piping in the box. The next frame had a few open queen cells and several on the point of hatching or with the queen being held in. I saw a virgin running around on the frame.
I started removing the queen cells and all in all I managed to cage 8 queens, most of them big healthy looking specimens.
He only had 3 Apideas so we sprayed bees from the runny colony with water, shook them into a lid and put a cupful in each Apidea. A virgin queen was introduced to each via the front door. I took the remaining five queens home and will make up 5 Apideas tomorrow if the queens are still alive in the morning. He didn't have any queen cages so I had to put the queens in transparent sample jars which he had from his last job as a milk inspector. (from which he retired 15 years ago, must have known they would come in useful some day)
There was a dead queen outside the box at the front and I reckon there were still two or three running around inside. They will fight it out as I removed all the queen cells. the trigger for a swarm is not having two queens, rather having a queen plus a sealed queen cell in the box. It was only about 11c today so a bit too cold for an attempt at swarming.
It's not a colony I would have chosen for queen rearing but you never know when a mated queen might come in handy. The bees were calm enough, just very runny on the comb.
Hope there are enough drones around as it is still very early. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.