Am I Queenless after returning a swarm

Beekeeping - Basics
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New beekeeper here, got my flow hive and a NUC just before Christmas 2024. All was going well, on advice of a mate I just had the brood box going with no super while the hive was young. I did inspections weekly for the first couple of weeks then missed a weekend due to bad weather. Everything looked to be going well during inspections, lots of capped brood, was even able to spot eggs and larvae and managed to find the queen during each one.

After missing one inspection on a weekend, the following Tuesday (21/1) my hive swarmed/split. There were still a heap of bees in the original brood box and some capped queen cells, I spoke with a local swarm catcher contact for some advice and it appears to have been a natural split. I couldn’t find any queen cells that looked like they had emerged yet, nor could I find any queen’s roaming round the original brood box.

I managed to catch the swarm into the NUC box and after chatting with a couple of swarm catcher people locally discussed the options of keeping it as a second hive, let the queens emerge in the flow hive and in a couple of weeks try and re-add the swarm or try now. I decided (probably wrongly in hindsight) to try and re-add it to the Flow hive the same day (an hour or two after it swarmed) by removing the queen cells in the hive, adding the super on with some newspapers in between, drop the swarm into the super let them make their way through and hopefully reintegrate with the original hive, which didn’t take long at all.

Fast forward to today (5 days post swarm event) and I did an inspection. Heaps of bees in there and I don’t think they swarmed again (I’ve been home all week and didn’t see it). I couldn’t find any capped brood, nor larvae/eggs and I spent ages but was unable to find the queen but not sure if that can be chalked up to inexperience, she could have been hiding in a pile of bees somewhere.

Given the lack of brood/eggs etc. Should I assume the hive is Queenless or could it be normal for her to take a break after the swarm event to get settled and start laying again?

Thanks all!

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Hi Mikal, welcome to the forum. It takes a little while for a queen in a swarm to start laying eggs, maybe 2 days, going by recent experience. It must be remembered that a queen will lay so many eggs in one day, depending on the number of nurse bees in the colony. Therefore she may have only laid eggs on one to two frames after five days. Then the trick is to find those frames out of, I’m guessing 2 boxes of frames. Look on the frames with the most bee activity. If you can’t see eggs, look for the classic honey arc above the empty cells that the colony has prepared for the queen to lay in. If you find that, you might find eggs if you look hard enough.

If you have any doubts as to whether the colony is queen-rite or not, slip in a frame of open brood containing newly laid fertile eggs. You might be able to acquire one from one of your contacts.

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