Hello All,
        Yesterday I opened up a hive.   There were lots of bees busily working,
tons of honey, but no brood, no eggs.  I found the remains of several
supersedure cells but absolutely no brood...nada, zip, zero.  The hive did't act
like it had lost its queen though, it was active, not really agressive, didn't
have that listless feel to it.          On the odds that it was in fact without a
queen, I rebuilt the hive as follows: (from the ground up) Old brood chamber 1,
Old brood chamber 2, double screen board (aka Snellgrove board) with opening to
back of hive, new brood chamber with 3 week old swarm and strong queen, queen
excluder, newspaper, honey supers with most of  the old bees shaken out.  My
thoughts were to wait a week and see if the lower hive had a new queen that just
hadn't started laying yet before I combined the two hives.
        All this leads to three questions:
1.  What are the odds that a hive totally bereft of  brood has a successful
supersedure queen that just hasn't started laying yet?  And, how long should I
give her to show signs of laying.
2.  If the old colony is in fact queenless (as I suspect), will the strong queen
above the screenboard give off enough  queen substance  to suppress any laying
workers (which I don't have now) until I unite the hives.
3.  Am I overthinking this and should I just combine the two without all this
fiddling around.
Thanks for any input in this matter
Patrick M. O Hearn, Aztec, New Mexico