These videos show us going through one of my hives that I accidentally left off the queen excluder a couple of weeks earlier. As you can see I did have experienced help and after going through every frame in each box 3 times and not finding the queen, he felt the hive had already swarmed twice. I never understood the reasoning behind the “twice” part but that’s me. We made a split and the short video shows how we left it the first time but he came back and took the split home with him to prevent them from returning back to the old hive. What he suggest now is that I need to wait 12 days and verify I have a new queen and remove queen cells. I am thinking about taking the flow frames out at that time and try to clean it up and put it back on. I hope the clean up goes well. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgZHvy008VrBKznU841YyS-o2JY08cYrT
The twice part is normal. The first swarm goes with the original mated queen when the first queen cell is capped. The new queen will emerge 8 days later and take a couple of days before she can fly. If the colony is strong the bees will keep any further emerging queens imprisoned but fed in their queen cells till the first queen out is ready to fly then they will swarm with her. They can then go with another and another after that till the colony settles down with one remaining queen
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