Lessons learned

The most important thing I learned this time around, since obviously I haven't learned it on previous occasions is: Don't experiment unless you're committed to having a time to follow it through.
Using the camping tent to store the honey bee equipment and woodworks et cetera has worked out pretty well. It has been a rainy, rainy six weeks and only a little bit got inside. All of the equipment seems to have weathered last fall and winter just fine.
What I didn't learn. When I put on the queen excluder as a way of separating hives and creating a nuc, I needed to be able to commit to checking up on a weekly basis.
It's been a whole month. It looked like things were okay. But we all know from the outside looking in there's no way to know what's going on.
So, today I went into the hive. Here's what I find
1) in the split that I have created earlier this season where I had a shallower box on the bottom and a brood box on top, I simply when in and reverse them. They were full of eggs and bees and capped brood and everything looked great. I put on a queen excluder and a honey super even though not all frames were totally built out on the exterior.
Feeling pretty proud of myself even though I haven't seen any swans this year and I have three swarm traps setup, I thought I was doing pretty good. I opened the hive that has two brood boxes and had seems very active. But, I had notice to things: the first was that there was very little pollen being brought in, that's evidence that there is no laying queen. The other thing I noticed was bee bodies, little bits to be bodies down on the bottom of the box. I use screen bottom so I can see what was going through.
When I open the hives it was apparent that in the top brood box there had been 2 or 3 queen cells that opened up. I wwa sure I saw what looks like a virgin queen. There was no evidence she was laying or that workers were storing honey in that entire brood box.
I remove the excluder and closed everything up. I then went to the other hive and took a frame of capped brood and hopefully some eggs and put it in the top brood chamber. If the bee I saw was a Virgin Queen, and if she is able to successfully mate in the coming week, and if she comes back and begins laying--- maybe, just maybe, this hive will be saved.
What did I learn: that you have to check it. I think my experiment could have worked if I had stayed on top of it and had taken the top box off with the Virgin Queen and let it become a nuk. Waiting a month meant there were bees that died, possibly drones that were caught in the upper chamber between the excluder and unable to get out, or perhaps they were other Queens.
It's been an interesting time.