#2 has a queen!

I looked into #2 today and saw a queen walking around on the frame.  There are still not a lot of bees and I did not see eggs (nor did I look hard for them).  I took off the super and will harvest the honey from it.  I considered moving the frames into a nuc box or dividing the current box somehow but decided to leave it as it is.

What happened to #2?

The apiary today

#2 used to have two deep and two medium boxes.Why now only one deep and one medium box?, you ask.  I will tell you.
Two days ago I noticed very little activity at #2's entrance.

#1

#2

 I immediately suited up and went into the hive.  Here is a pictorial of what I saw:

Under the telescoping lid

Under the Vivaldi box

Under the top super

Under the bottom super

Under the top deep box

As you can easily see, there are hardly any bees.  Unlike this strong hive (picture from Guildford Dragon NEWS:


I went through the hive and found only a couple of hundred bees, mostly on 2-3 frames in the top brood box.  There was a spotty patch of capped brood and some larvae.  The only drone brood I saw as on a frame bare of bees.  There were many queen cups, a couple of which were partially drawn out, but all were empty.  There was one (smaller than usual) queen cell with an open end indicative of an emerged queen.  I did not see a queen nor any eggs.  I looked for any bees with DWV or any mite feces and found none.  I did not want to do an alcohol wash since that would kill a large percentage of the colony.  Not knowing what else to do, I removed one super and changed the entrance reducer to its smallest size.  I figured there were a few options.  1. Do nothing and observe. 2. Perform an assiduous search for a queen. If she is there, do nothing. if she is not there, either repopulate with the nuc or combine the colony with one of my other hives. 3. Either combine or repopulate without searching for the queen.  I then wrote to my mentor and posted on Beesource Beekeeping Forums.  It was my mentor's opinion that, at best, the colony had swarmed and the new queen had not yet started laying.  She suggested waiting a week and if no queen activity then, go ahead and combine the hive.  A beekeeper on the forum said pretty much the same thing.  That is pretty optimistic, but I think that if they had swarmed that there would be many more bees left behind and much more brood.
Today I removed the bottom deep box, as in the opening picture.
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask.
There still is forage in our yard-

Oak hydrangea