Paranoia and emergncy inspection

While watching the bees this afternoon, one suddenly flew right at my face, landing on my mustache! I frantically brushed it off and made a rapid retreat. My girls had never been so fiesty... except once, when they were queenless! Oh-no! What if I had lost the queen in the last inspection? Would it be too late in the year to replace her? Would I even be able to get a new queen? Who would I consult? Would Tom at Honey Bee Genetics be able to help? These thoughts and more went through my mind as I was tending to the roses. Would the 3 more days until Friday to inspect make a difference? I decided to bite the bullet and take a look today. I would go right to the deep box, remove the drone brood frame and look for the queen. If she wasn't in the deep box, I'd put the middle super on and look for her there, then the top super if need be. A short inspection.
But first, a little about why I wanted to remove the drone brood frame and what I had been watching at the hive entrance.
When I looked at the hive yesterday evening, I saw many dead bees on the porch. Was there a problem? Then I saw that they were dead drone larvae and there were actually trails leading to them where they had been dragged. There were even more bodies on the ground in front of the hive. I had read that the bees would eat the dead larva and recapture the protein. Perhaps they were unpalatable because they had been sitting unfrozen in the garage for so long. I figured I'd take a drive to Mountain Feed & Farm Supply this week to get some new frames, and on Friday, next planned inspection, replace the drone frame with a regular frame.
When looking at the hive entrance today, I saw two bees struggling with each other. One was a Russian and the other an Italian, an interloper! The Russian was all over the trespasser and dragged her off the porch and they fell to the ground. The wrestling carried them over to the dry creek, where finally the Italian escaped and flew off. It didn't look like either was trying to sting, but the Russian seemed to be biting the other one. I suppose I'll learn more about this sort of thing further along in my text book. So, later on, I saw two more bees struggling, but they were both Russians. They fought around on the porch, then suddenly stopped and began grooming themselves. It was then that I was attacked.
Back to the inspection: After smoking the hive, I inverted the top on the ground and placed the top super on it. Then the middle super went on top of it, making sure that the clumps of bees were over the lid and the other super. I also looked on the ground to be sure the queen hadn't fallen off in the transfer. I took out the drone brood frame, which still had plenty of dead larvae in it. The workers had started repairing the cells also. I set this frame aside, with a few hundred bees on it, and started looking for the queen, one frame at a time. The first two frames didn't have much going on. Then I started seeing capped brood. I looked and looked for larvae, but didn't see any. Oh-oh, no new eggs would mean no queen. Frame after frame, capped brood, no larvae, no queen. Then, much to all our relief, there she was on the 3rd to last frame. Whew!