hive swarmed back to original hive + found a queen 20 feet away later-on ???

[tandemrx]

Odd scenario.

I went to the bee yard of 8 hives to do a few chores.  My busiest hive is a new package from this year.  I knew the population was getting pretty huge but hadn't inspected since I put on second super a month ago (and a 3rd recently).

While doing my chores the hive swarmed.  Monster swarm, had to be 15,000 in the air.  They filled the air 20 feet above and around the hive.  I cursed myself that I didn't bring a nuc box or any box to capture them after they landed on their temporary spot.

Standing in the middle of the airy swarm I couldn't see them landing anywhere.  Finally 5-10 minutes later they started to land . . . back on the same hive . . . . covered the face and the bottom of the hive and frantically made their way back in the hive.  Another 10 minutes later and other than a ball of bees under the hive and a huge beard they were mostly all back in the hive.

From my readings on this forum I understood this was likely an aborted attempt for whatever reason and they would likely re-swarm again soon. (I do not have clipped wing queens).

So, went home to get another hive body or 2 to split the colony to do an artificial swarm.  Not very keen on this since it is so late in the season, but felt I had little choice other than to just let them swarm (& with potential afterswarms I may end up with a compromised hive anyway - with splitting I may have 2 compromised hives, but at least maybe one will make it).

When I came back a few hours later I set my equipment down about 20-30 feet behind the hives in a little stand of trees . . . and I hear some bee buzzing and wonder if their might be a swarm nearby . . . my ears finally direct me to the ground right near where I was standing where I find 7-10 bees on the ground in a loose cluster.  I get on my hands and knees and lo and behold there is a small queen with some workers grooming her and giving her some attention (but not attacking her, just crawling around by her).

This queen to me looked very small and even the plate on the back of her thorax seemed underdeveloped, like it wasn't fully firmed up.  her abdomen was smaller than I have ever seen on a queen.

So, I have no clue what is going on, but I really think this might be a virgin queen.  In any case I pick her up and put her in a queen cage I have in my tool box to contemplate what to do now.

I go to work on the original hive and the 2 hive bodies are just busting with bees on every frame in the box.  There are no less than 20 capped swarm cells and some uncapped with large larvae.

I search for the original queen (still supposing I have a virgin in the queen in the queen cage) but I don't find her . . . gguidester from this forum and I check every frame and we can't find a queen, but honestly on many of the frames the bees were 2 or 3 deep and hanging in big blobs on the frames and it would have been near on impossible to locate a queen.  There were still even a good bundle of bees underneath the hive bearded down and a whole mess in the supers, so I decided I still have to split.

I take 10 frames full of bees and brood and some eggs (but no queen cells) and put it into a separate hive.  I leave the original hive with some queen cells (got rid of some, there were so many) and 10 frames of bees and brood.  They each got a super that also had bees in them and I gave them both an extra hive body to start to work on.

I had set the queen cage on the new hive while I searched for the queen and it was covered with bees, although most of them were fanning or walking over the cage and didn't seem aggressive at all.  I put some fondant in the entrance to the queen cage and put it in the new hive.

The queen was released within 36 hours (checked yesterday).

So, I am not sure if what I did made anything better or maybe I just split what was a strong hive into 2 hives that may not get strong enough to make it through winter.

I am still perplexed about this queen that I find 20-30 feet from the hive, but that only had about 7-10 bees around her.  She could fly at least some because while I had her on my hive tool she flew back to the ground where her bee workers friends were.  I had a good long time to look at her as I tried to corral her into the queen cage.  She just did not look like a mature mated queen to me, but I have to say, the only virgin queen I have seen was one that died just coming out of a queen cell on a different hive, so I am no expert on telling the difference from a mated queen and a virgin queen.  But I have seen enough queens to know that she had a small abdomen.

Any thoughts on this mess  :?

Thanks to gguidester for working with me on this hive.  He can vouch for how many bees were in this hive.  I don't think I have seen a more populated hive.