Flummoxed

Yesterday I went to check up on the bees again, together with a little helper, expecting to have to control the swarm (Delain fans will get the pun). But the bees are once again not doing what they should and I am really, really confused.

Lots of bees, no queen

The bees have definitely not swarmed, as the brood box and super were full with bees. But there was no sign of the queen. We went through all frames four times, using a feather to brush off bees to look at the layers beneath. No queen. Now, I know the queen is not marked and she can be tricksy, but she just wasn't visible at all. Furthermore, though there are still larvae, there were no eggs. No eggs means no queen - right? Another clue that the queen has somehow magically disappeared was the fact that nearly all unsealed queen cups were empty and we saw a number of queen cells that were closed. Normally the old queen will have swarmed before the new queen cells are sealed. The weather hasn't been good, granted, but the fact that after having destroyed all queen cells on Tuesday, there were several sealed queen cells suggest the bees have turned some worker cells into queen cells.
Simple (or not so simple, as I just spent 10 minutes working this out correctly!) maths will explain this:
8 days after laying the queen cell is usually sealed. Eggs hatch three days after laying. Any worker larva can be turned into a queen larva/ cell up to two days after hatching. So if two day old larvae were suddenly raised to be a queen (because something happened to the queen either on or after Tuesday), then Friday would be the earliest date for queen cells to be sealed (larvae two days old on Tuesday means they have another three days before they are sealed, which means they would have been sealed Friday). However, if the queen had laid new eggs in new queen cells after I destroyed all on Tuesday, then the cells would not be sealed yet, the larvae would still be at the start of their development.
Fact is, I really don't know what's going on. I cannot imagine that the Moon queen has vanished (again!). I cannot imagine I killed her accidentally on Tuesday during the inspection, as I was as careful as always (which, perhaps, isn't careful at all, though my helpers attest I was gentle). I cannot imagine she swarmed alone - so what has she done? Maybe she is still hiding and will swarm as soon as the weather allows, in which case I will have lost a swarm and have to accept that - I did what I could.

Why can't bees behave like in the textbooks??!?

Looking ahead, I destroyed all queen cells, leaving only two that looked good. If my calculations are correct, these are due to emerge on Saturday, 26th April. My plan is to raise both queens, one in the nuc box, the other in the original hive, just in case one of the queens fails to mate properly - though there are plenty of drones about (that we annoyingly kept mistaking for the queen).

I must say all through the two hour operation of searching through all frames several times the bees were very well behaved. I was stung once, my helper three times (in the gloves - the sting didn't go through to the skin), but that was it. The bees calmly gathered on the outside of the hive, waiting for the disturbance to end. Despite their wayward ways, I do love them.

This colony has definitely NOT swarmed!