Someone suggested testing with a frame of eggs/young larvae to see if
a hive has a queen before ordering a new one.  There is a minus to
this procedure and it is time.  While waiting to see how this comes
out, old bees are dying and the colony is dwindling.  I think it
makes more sense to order a new queen at once and consider her
purchase price as the premium on an insurance policy.  If there was a
new queen in the colony the store-bought one will get killed but you
will not have wasted any precious days.

I keep a queen excluder under my hive to force swarms to
self-retrieve but am aware that it might keep a virgin queen from
mating.  In this situation of uncertainty, I remove the excluder and
also insert a new mated queen.  Usually I'm wrong and the new queen
gets killed but I don't lose any population unnecessarily.  Dan Hendricks

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