interruption in laying?

[caticind]

So last week I pulled a couple of honey frames up in the second deep to encourage more building there, as the bees had been ignoring it.  Success on that front!  However...

I had brought several empty frames indoors and found 5 or 6 SHB.  I figure they were hiding from the bees in the second deep, so I got some of those beetle-eater traps.  While moving the honey up, I checked one brood frame.  At that time, there was a great solid brood pattern, but I thought some of the larvae looked a bit funny, a little off-white.  I haven't opened the hive for 7 days.  So today, when I went to install the beetle traps, I inspected the brood frames carefully to see what was going on.

Where before there was a lot of capped brood and quite a few larvae, and eggs, today I saw very little and scattered capped brood.  Perhaps, I thought, they have all just hatched out and the current caps are where the few gaps were in the pattern before.  There were eggs and all stages of larvae, but not as many as I would have expected, certainly they were not filling all the spaces.  Currently more than half of the brood cells appear to be empty.  The bees are also storing some pollen in the center of the brood nest.

We found two swarm cells, open, unused and untenanted, and the start of a single "supercedure" position cell in the middle of the #3 frame.  None of these were in use, and they may have been there for some time, as it's been a couple of weeks since I inspected in the brood nest.  I understand they sometimes keep these around "just for insurance"?

We did not see the queen, but since there were eggs I think she's ok.  Just not sure what's going on with her laying.  Here's a shot of a whole frame.  You can see pollen and how little brood there is.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

I thought I saw some strange stuff in a few individual cells, what might have been white or grey goo. Here's a closeup that includes one of those.  Bottom left quadrant.



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

And another.  There's some white goo with a shiny black lump just up and to the right of the healthy pupa.  Maybe a SHB?



Uploaded with ImageShack.us

What do you think?  Am I looking at the aftermath of a brood disease?  EFB?  Queen being superceded - she was laying like crazy last week...?  Or has the queen just not filled in yet and I'm jumping to conclusions?

[iddee]

Guess #1... The flow as subsided and the queen has slowed laying..

Guess #2... The center frames have too much pollen. They need to be moved to the outside and the non-pollen frames moved to the center.

Guess #3... They are preparing to, or have already, swarm.

Maybe both 1 and 2.

[caticind]

Any of those are plausible...  I considered splitting about 2 weeks ago, but didn't think the girls had enough stores.  I guess they may feel otherwise.

Additional data - later the same day I went back out and found mortician bees dragging out large numbers of dead.  I don't think they are mine -smaller and blacker, probably feral.  Possibly my inspection set off robbing after I left?

At the same time I saw at least one bee carrying out a larvae.  It was as long as the bee and appeared at a short glance to be healthy - it was the right color, at any rate.

If they are throwing out larvae, perhaps the flow has subsided and they are pulling out drone larvae?

[caticind]

Further follow-up:

I opted to go ahead and open up the broodnest, in case the girls haven't quite made up their minds about swarming yet.  So I went in and interspersed a few empty frames (4 of 10) and moved pollen-heavy frames outwards and honey frames up into the second box.  While there, I went back and looked for the goop in photo 2 in my original post. 

Sure enough, on one frame I found several "melted" larvae.  I pulled a couple out with tweezers and put them in a ziploc so I could get a closer look.  They were definitely larvae once, but are very squishy.  Off-white, with some translucent markings like threads.  They smell like sour milk.

This same frame had a fair amount of capped brood and many more healthy larvae than melty ones - maybe 6 or 7 obviously dead larvae on the whole side of the frame.

Does anyone recognize this brood disease?