Swarm possibly returned?

[XYZ]

Hi everyone,

I'm struggling with one of my colonies and would appreciate some pointers please.

The situation:
Hive - 11 frame Abelo poly national brood box with QE and three supers on top. Top super nearly full, middle super half way, bottom super just frames of foundation. First super went on when they had 7 frames of brood.

- 25.04.2020 - 2019 queen clipped
- 02.05.2020 - colony attempted swarm. Found queen on floor. Put her and plenty of bees into 6 frame nuc. Gave two frames of brood and some stores. Went through original hive and took down all QCs we could find. Gave original colony frames with foundation to replace brood frames. Stores came from what I had in storage.
- 09.05.2020 - original hive swarmed again. We saw where they went and when the bees settled down I set up a bait hive near them as they were far up in a tree. After we returned and had some lunch we carried out inspection and saw another spike in activity in the apiary. Hive was bearding like crazy. Assuming the swarm came back as it wasn't in the tree later on and the brood box was chocker during inspection despite the supers being around 50% or less capacity.
Took down more QCs. They all seemed small and unimpressive.

Even at 10pm there were bees clumped in the tunnel entrance floor.

They are currently at 6 frames of brood but seem to be packed in there. It doesn't exactly make sense but do I need to move them to double brood?

I know I've obviously missed QCs and need to be sharper in future, but what would you do next? Could there be two virgin queens there? Should I expect them to try again tomorrow?

 

[Erichalfbee]

You’ve obviously missed queen cells.
I think the only viable option is to let them get on with it and see what happens. After they swarmed initially and you moved the queen what you should have done was remove all the queen cells apart from one well placed open one with a larva in it then gone back five days later to remove any more
Destroying all of them then leaving them to it has resulted in lots of virgins in there.

You best hope they settle down with one to get mated even though you wil have a severely depleted colony.

 

[XYZ]

Yeah I should have been back earlier than 7 days, that's a lesson I've learned for sure.
The reason I took down all QCs when the first swarm occurred was because we heard piping. I assumed since there was piping, there was a virgin queen, then I could remove QCs.
I didn't expect them to build more QCs after a virgin had emerged so that's another lesson learned.

 

[beeno]

It makes more sense to me if you missed a QC when the primary swarm left as they swarm again 7 days later 9+7=16 days for the development of a queen.

 

[XYZ]

Yeah I think that's when it all started. No activity today since it was freezing - completely opposite weather to yesterday.
Hopefully they'll turn their attention to the undrawn super...