Well, I had my suspicions that they'd do this to me in the week that the weather changed, especially as I hadn't managed to inspect on saturday or sunday.

I turned up today and immediately noticed that there were a lot of bees sniffing around the equipment stack, the shed and the other empty hives on site. Opening up the hive, the first thing apparent was that they'd completely ignored the frames of foundation that I'd sneaked in last week

Working through, sure enough queen cells and sealed to boot, about 10 in total. Fortunately I'd also spotted eggs and the Queen herself inevitably nestled on the super frame in the brood box for drone culling which also hosted the majority of the queen cells.

Having coaxed her Maj onto a standard national frame I checked it for queen cells, removed any that I found and place it in the middle of the new 14x12 hive surrounded by Foundation.

I then moved the original hive about 4 feet to the left, with the entrance oriented 90 degrees away from the existing hive, stuck the crownboard back on and placed the new 14x12 in the original hive location.

I then replaced the Queen Excluder and the supers back on the 14x12 hive. I left the bees that were in the supers on the super frames.

I next made up a Nuc of 2 drawn frames of stores which I topped up with syrup simply by pouring syrup onto the open comb and 3 frames of brood including a frame with 2 queen cells, one sealed, the other still open. This I placed on top of the 14x12 hive, entrance turned 90 degrees to the main hive and reduced to 1-2 bee size.

The old national hive now consists of 6 drawn frames, 1 mostly pollen and nectar, but with some brood, and 5 frames of foundation. I also left a miller feeder on top with about half a litre of 1:1 syrup as I forgot the spare crownboard I'd taken home to clean up in preparation so couldn't use a rapid feeder instead.
This has two sealed queen cells, next to each other, on the super frame, rough location marked with a drawing pin.

As I hadn't lost the swarm I'm going to assume that my queen cells are 8 days old on the basis that if they'd been capped for any length of time and given the ok weather (a bit chilly to inspect, but not raining) yesterday that if they were older I'd have lost the swarm. That should mean that if I go next sunday, I should be in a position to try and open the cells myself and let them out, the Nuc is a bit different as it has one sealed cell and a much younger unsealed one at the moment.

The big question is, what did I do wrong, or what did I forget to do?

I'd intended to take some photos for an article I'm planning, but inevitably BOTH batteries were flat so I got none