Gosh! I’ve got a lot to learn!
Aah, I can see you are talking about Australia. Still not sure who or what the DPI is. Department of Primary Industry?
That last frame photo has queen cells on it. Probably emergency queen cells from the location. Here is a very good document to learn about the types of queen cells, and what to do when you find them:
https://wbka.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/wbka-booklet-english-PDF.pdf
Probably a mixture of wax moth and small hive beetle larvae.
Hi Fran, those thread/worm like structures in the tray are wax moth larvae consuming the debris in the tray, which is a natural occurrence & nothing to worry about.
I also see those queen cells. It may have been the colonies last attempt at making a queen because they are emergency cells, not swarm cells, by my reckoning.
In NSW, every beehive/beekeeper must be registered with the DPI, the same as here in Qld. Therefore if you didn’t know who the DPI were, your hive probably wasn’t registered with them.
In retrospect, the law is probably a bit slack in the fact that people who sell or donate colonies to new beekeepers don’t have to inform them of their obligation.
In reality: the rules should be changed so that people selling or donating colonies should make sure the recipient registers with the DPI, or notify them themselves.
In your case now, you don’t have a colony, so therefore I’m guessing that you wont have an obligation until you get a new colony. However you do have equipment from which a colony died out from, therefore it would be in your best interest to make sure that equipment is free of any disease spores. I wouldn’t use that equipment as it stands to put a colony in until I knew it was free of disease spores.
Good luck with it Fran. cheers
Thanks Dawn, I’m just reading it now. A lot of valuable information. I had no idea there was so much to beekeeping but I think I am hooked.
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Hi Jeff, would I expect to see a lot of dead bees in the bottom of the hive if it was varroa or some other disease? There are about 10 dead bees currently.
Most times when a hive has succumbed to varroa, there are no bees anywhere…the live bees vacate to adjacent hives…the only time I’ve seen adult bees dead due to varroa is after a long period of confinement…like our winters in Canada.
I see no indication of diseased combs in any of your photos…AFB scale is easy to spot once you know what to look for. But what I do see are queen cells that were formed and this makes me highly suspicious that your bees left because of a queen related problem.
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Hi Fran, I just re-read everything you said before replying. To answer your question. No because the diseases we have affect the brood, not the live bees. Forget about varroa because we currently don’t have that to worry about.
After re-reading & adding up the time lines, it just seems obvious to me the the population dwindled on account of not enough bees being born to replace normal mortality.
You saw a gradual decline in Feb/Mar, followed by “At the end of April … Over this period they were still getting quieter & not so busy”.
It’s the gradual decline that you observed that makes me think that there must have been a brood disease which caused this to happen.
If your colony swarmed you would see a sudden decline, not a gradual decline.
Another possibility that would rule out a disease would be if the colony superseded the queen before Feb/March, then that new queen turned out to be a very poor performer, so therefore the population slowly dwindled.
If your colony swarmed during Feb., then the new queen failed to get mated, the remaining colony would not have lasted as long as it did, seeing as the last bees left only 3 weeks & 5 days ago.
You did no brood inspection during this time. That rules out the queen getting accidentally killed or balled by the bees.
You never saw debris covering the whole tray at any time, which to my mind indicates the colony never got strong enough at any time to want to swarm.
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Thanks Jeff, I’m sure they didn’t swarm as I was looking at the hive several times a day and working around them in the garden (they were very friendly bees). They used to become noisy late afternoon but that gradually quietened and stopped as did the bees that used to once be crowding whatever the entrance is called. I thought it was because the weather was getting cooler. I will watch all the videos of the bee course, educate myself better, hang close to this very helpful forum, and start again. Thanks a ton for you comments and help.
Many thanks. I obviously have a lot to learn about queens so I will keep reading and watch the videos of the course I subscribed to. I’m also going to join the local beekeepers association … once this lockdown ends. 
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You’re welcome Fran, the point that I want to emphasize is: If the colony did succumb to a brood disease, those frames will still be carrying spores from whatever disease might have caused the hive to die out. Therefore it’s important, in my view & based on personal experience, with the benefit of much hindsight, for you to get those frames checked before re-using them.
cheers