Reply To: They swarmed from just the one queen cell and now only emergency QC’s left??
You did not necessarily miss QCs. I think it’s just as likely that they still had viable larvae on 26 Apr that they have fed up into emergency QCs. I know that 7 days should mean that the larvae are over 3 days old, but I wonder exactly what time you took the queen out, exactly what time you took down all the other QCs etc, and, in the end, bees don’t stick to the hard-and-fast numbers in the books. Quite possibly the emergency QCs have very poor queens that will not be fertile. When this happened to me, I put one of the emergency QCs in a nuc and tried to raise it, but I never got her to lay
I don’t see any problem uniting the cast swarm with the (soon to be) broodless bees remaining in the original hive – assuming you have removed all the emergency QCs, of course!