Experiment to save queen foiled

The colony in Olea's hive has been dying.  There are very few bees in there yet the queen has surprised me by surviving.  Today I decided that it was time to remove the comb so that I  could clean the hive and prepare it for the spring.
Once again I saw the queen with a solitary attendant.  There were at most 5 other bees in the hive eating honey.

I then took a close look at the cells on the frame.  There were eggs!  And they seemed to be in a good pattern, that is all cells in the area had an egg.  I tried to get a photo:

Those white smudges in the cells are eggs

Now what?  I thought Olea's had died because of queen failure, but maybe not.  These eggs were either dead or would soon be because there were no nurse bees to keep them warm and feed them.
But, I thought, maybe I could save the queen by putting her in a nuc with some brood from one of the other hives!
I closed up Olea's and got to work.  I fetched a nuc box from the shed.  I wanted to put in two frames of drawn comb, two frames of honey and one frame of capped brood with nurse bees on it.  I already had four frames of empty comb that had been frozen to kill any mites or wax moth eggs, so I selected two of these.  I then opened #2 and took two frames of honey from the top box.  I replaced these with two empty frames (that I had to run over to the shed to get).  I lifted off the heavy top box and looked into the bottom box.  I found a frame with capped brood, saw the queen on a different frame, misted the bees with my homemade honey-b-healthy and put it in the nuc.  Now to get the queen.
I figured I would mist her as well.  I had no idea if this would work at all.  I was essentially making a split in late fall.  The queen may have actually been failing or the nurse bees would not accept her or there were not enough workers or even something else.
I went back into Olea's and.... no queen!  I looked at each frame and the bottom of the box several times.  Where could she have gone?  Maybe crawled out and fell to the ground; I did not see her there but, of course, she would have crawled off somewhere.  Maybe a yellow jacket came and got her.  We will never know.
Now I had to put everything back into hive #2, which I did with some effort.
Lesson learned:  I brought a jar to the hive to put the queen in and then euthanize her.  I should have (shoulda, coulda, woulda) put her in the jar when I first saw her.  Then I could have later reported on the results of my experiment.