What is going on?

[BC2173]

I live in central Alabama and am very new to bee keeping.  I have two hives.  Hive 1 is near perfect.  Hive 2 is crazy.
In Hive 2, I asked a friend of mine to come by and take a look.  He has been into beekeeping for awhile and knows a good bit, but we both are a bit confused by what we see.
I have two hives - got both of these on the same day - April 8th.  Hive 1 went well - queen was accepted quickly and they are doing great.  Hive 2 - queen looked very weak and almost dead.  Put her in the hive and we found her the next day - dead.  We then heard a queen piping out of that hive.  So we put it all back together and came back around the 15th to check it out.  Could not find queen at all so my friend came by on the 16th with a queen.  She was marked blue and bees were definitely interested in her.  She went into the hive and several workers were taking care of her.  Went back in on the 25th and could not find the queen.  We cannot find any queen, but we see several larva and all eggs are laid in the very center of the cell.  No workers - just dozens of drones and 2 queen cells.  One cell had two eggs/larva in it, but just one cell had this.  We are considering looking for the queen again on Sunday and see if she is just off to a slow start or ??? 

Advise on next step please.

[Kathyp]

Wait.  You can't tell drone from worker by eggs.  If you have single eggs in the center of cells, you probably have a queen. Probably a new one.  It is not at all uncommon for packages to have more than one queen, so no matter what happened to the one you put in, it sounds like you are ok.

When you check on sunday, tell us what you find.  Also check your queen cells and tell us about those.  of course pictures are always a plus  ;-)

[BC2173]

Kathy - thanks for answering.  Also, I misspoke concerning eggs.  We did find several eggs down in the center of cells, but all of the capped brood was enormous compared to what we found in the first hive.  There are probably a total of about 50 capped brood cells and all are very large; they actually seem to stick up higher than the rest of the comb.  There is a capped queen cell near the bottom of that one frame and a new queen cell under construction on the bottom of the frame next to it.  On that second frame, there are about 2 dozen capped brood cells. 
All drones.  I will try to get pictures today.

[GSF]

Hey Kathy, this is my buddy/neighbor. It's the dangest thing I ever saw. The eggs says it's queen right, the drone cells says she's not mated, however - How to explain the one beautiful queen cell is beyond me. There's only about 3(?) frames of drawn comb as well. The queen should have been an easy spot.

[Kathyp]

was the brood pattern good.  might be a drone layer.  do you have any frames with queen cells on them?  you might think about scraping his and putting a couple of good queen cells in there if don't think you have laying workers. 

Don't know.  Sounds odd. 

[GSF]

It's not laying workers because the eggs are perfectly centered in the bottom. We're hoping she's misfiring and will get straightened out. The swarm cells/frames is our plan B.