Newspaper merge, the WTF??!!

So, yesterday I was prepared to merge my laying worker hive with my strong hive using a layer of newspaper between the two. My plan was to then take the two honey supers and rob and merge to one with sufficient f ood for the upper box till they ate their way to meeging. 

All went well. Both colonies were quiet even tho' I did not smoke them heavily. I moved the new double decker over to straddle the old location then turned my attention to the honey supers.

I culled, sorted bushes off bees from all 5he frames. Then, putting in a mixture of blanks *with no drawn wax) and about 5 frames with nectar. 

During the culling I discovered this frame. Uneven wax, drone sized cells, larvae, two tiny queen cells in development. Look inside. Multiple eggs. Do I have laying workers in the super of the strong hive? WTF!

My two concerns: Is there a queen successfully laying in the main brood box? Perhaps, i mixed up the source of the frames. Second concern is the extreme heat. It's been in the 90s. I'm venting the top cover, let's hope it's enough.

No queen! Laying worker(s)

Just got back from taking the entire east hive apart. There is no queen. There was some drone larvae and so I broke the whole thing apart walked it across the field and only let bees that could fly go back into the hive.
Hopefully, whatever laying worker(s) had deposited those drones are gone. There were no queen cells. Nothing. Nada.
If I put in a new queen, and the laying workers are still there, they will kill her.
I'm thinking I'll merge this hive with my strong hive thru newspaper. Then, if the hive continues strong I'll split after the flow is over and I've extracted on the 4th of July.

New queen for the East

I was able to secure a queen on Monday morning. I took her out to the farm, took the honey super off, hung her cage with two attendants between one of the 10 frames, after I took one out to provide room. To help with acceptance I smeared a little bit of honey on the outside.
On the whole the hive was not particularly feisty yet I could not find any larva in it. Did that mean that there had been a young mated queen that just did not have a chance to start laying? Not sure.
I set the honey super in the shade and proceeded to check each frame to see if it would be worthy to be extracted.
I had had a queen excluder between the brood box and the honey super to ensure that no eggs were laid in the honey super. Some of the honey frames were capped some or not. I was able to take four frames pretty much totally capped back to the house. The remaining six had some nectar in them and a surprise.
Along the bottom of one of the frames in a very small area, a dozen cells with uncapped larvae curled in the bottom.
The hypothesis: not a laying worker, but a skinny mated Queen had managed to get through the excluder or at least get her rump to the excluder and was laying eggs in that bottom row.
Of course, none of this came to me until after I had left the farm. I had put that frame back into the super. The next day I returned for empty frames with plasti cell foundation for the super so they wouldn't start making burr comb.
I will go out on Friday to make sure the queen has been released.
Update: which idiot failed to remove cap on candy so workers could eat it open? Found her still trapped, released her, dropping cage once, should be OK. Will wait will one week go by to check -- May 18.

The good, and the not so good

So it's the first time I've been able to get in to the hives since the last post.
I've been concerned that the East hive, the one with the full honey super, has been queenless. And sure enough, it is although the ladies were quite calm.
When I was out earlier today, everything looked quiet and I was afraid that both of them could be queenless. But, as we know, you cannot judge a hive from the outside. I
I opened the east and found they were indeed queenless. The west hive, in the intervening hour from when I was first out here, had had a brood burst or a recent brood burst because you can see from the picture, there were an enormous number of bees taking orientation flights.
I took two frames, both relatively covered with capped brood, and a few open cells which I believe had eggs in them. I shook them off and transferred them to the east hive.
I hope that that will keep them strong enough until I can do two things.
1. I have to take the honey super off and extract it.
2. I have to find Queen.
I noticed that the frame of brood that I took had a lot of cap drone cells on it. Many of these were ripped open as I moved the frames from one hive to another.
So it goes. Both of the hives had relatively quiet temperaments so I believe that once I requeen the east hive, we will be cooking with gas.