Population growing. Unusual comb. Honey-B-Healthy

The population of both hives has grown but still the bottom boxes aren't full.  Neither queen was spotted.....again.  I know that they are there because the area of brood has expanded and I see very young larvae.  I'm beginning to wonder a bit about the process of re-queening.  I will be combining a nuc with a queen and I want the new queen to take over.  The only way I know to insure that is to remove the old queen.  You may recall that I had a two-queen hive a while back; then it didn't matter to me which queen survived.  Perhaps there is some sort of way to trap a queen.  I will ask my mentors. 
Along the thoughts of re-queening.  Long ago, Kathy Nevin gave me a frame of brood when by population was small.  To keep the bees from fighting, she sprayed them with a sugar and essential oil solution.  Recently I asked what this was- it's something called Honey-B-Healthy.  So I went on line to find a recipe and today I made it- I used 4 cups of water, 4 cups of sugar, 12 drops of lemon oil, 12 drops of spearmint oil and about 1/8 teaspoon of lecithin granules.  I bought everything at Aptos Natural Foods.

Capped drone cells

Back to the hives.  There were some capped drone cells in the drone frame in the old hive.  Nothing was going on with the other drone frame in the new hive.  I left the old hive alone and moved the other drone frame into the bottom box.  There were a lot of drone cells at the bottom of the frames and in the brace comb.  When I took frames out, a few broke open exposing the larvae.  The bees were at them; I know that they eat dead larvae, so they were probably starting to eat these. 

Bees all over the brace comb

I was a bit surprised at how much brace frame the girls had made it the new hive between the two boxes since I scraped it out two weeks ago.

Irregular comb in old hive top box

In the old hive, on the frame across from the capped drone cells, the bees had built an irregular comb.

I took out the dark comb from Olea's hive as had been recommended at the top bar hive class I went to a few weeks ago.  The empty comb is unexpectedly light.  There was an interesting transition from small cells to drone cells   The comb is now sitting in plastic bags ready to be rendered.