Dinah and I went into #2 this afternoon.
As with #3, there was little honey stored, so I will remove the empty super. This hive still had a fair number of drones running about, no drone corpses on the bottom and a handful of drone brood.
We saw an open queen cell in the top brood box.
Even though the focus is bad, you can see this is chewed open at the bottom indicating that a queen has emerged. You can also see that this is at the bottom of the frame, therefore a swarm cell. I conclude that this is the hive that swarmed at the end of August. (By the way, the swarm died in the nuc.) We looked for the queen but did not find her. I did see some larvae, and better yet, cells with royal jelly in the bottom. That means that there have been eggs laid in the past 1-3 days, a very good sign.
I then did an alcohol wash, making quadruply sure that the queen was not on the frame. The picture below speaks for itself.
Tomorrow I will treat all three hives with Apiguard.
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