The hive that went queenless and had laying workers from three weeks ago is no more (I hope). I went ahead with my plan of adding in a frame of eggs/young brood to convince them to generate their own queen but they didn't do that. With as many laying workers as there were I suspect that any cells which were young enough to become a queen had other eggs added to them which made them unusable for queen production.
I repeated this process of adding young bees for three weeks and only one queen cell was created. I knew it wasn't viable though because in order for it to contain a female bee it would have to be at least 22 days old. Queen bees do not stay in their cell that long, and furthermore by looking in the cell I could see that the young bee wasn't even close to pupating.
I decided that this hive simply wasn't going to requeen themselves. With that in mind I decided to attempt to combine them with another hive. The safest way to do this is to shake the bees out onto the grass and remove their old hive. The workers will either die or find their way into a new hive. I decided to do something with more risk to it and an opportunity to learn something new. I stacked the hive on top of a good hive with a single sheet of newspaper between them. The idea is that the workers will gradually remove this newspaper and by the time it is gone they will act as a single hive. The risk is if the bad hive doesn't play nice they can kill the queen in the other hive. Let's hope that doesn't happen!
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