2 hives with no brood

[2hives]

I have 3 hives, one booming with approx. 150 lbs. of honey to extract on it. The other 2 hives have not been putting up much honey at all. Every appearance of well populated colonies, but not as many as the boomer. I've checked each hive weekly for the last 5 or 6 weeks. Only a little progress in the 2 non-producers each time I check. Last Saturday I did a more thorough check and found no brood in either hive. One is all mediums (5), the other is one deep, 3 mediums. (the boomer has 9 mediums) I did find a few queen cells in one, all uncapped. In the other one I didn't see any queen cells. Neither colony was aggressive, or seemed out-of-sorts, very gentle, like the booming hive.
What do you make of this? Recent swarms, need more time for queens to lay? (both at the same time?) Coincidence that both go queenless at the same time?
Should I take them apart again and try to find queens? Help!

[Mike Gillmore]

They could have swarmed, with possible additional afterswarms. It's common to see multiple colonies swarm on or near the same days. You may have virgin queens in the two colonies, but it will be extremely difficult to find them.

My two cents.... Put a frame with eggs from your boomer in each of the two colonies, then check back in about a week. You should find either queen cells ready to be capped if it is queenless, or if you had a virgin queen she may have started to lay eggs at that point. Also, if the brood area is honeybound, remove some capped frames of honey and replace with empty drawn comb to open up the brood area for the queen.

[Fred Bee]

I agree with Mike, put a frame of brood and fresh eggs in them and if they need to make a queen they will.

[tecumseh]

2hives writes:
I did find a few queen cells in one, all uncapped. In the other one I didn't see any queen cells. Neither colony was aggressive, or seemed out-of-sorts, very gentle

tecumseh replies: sounds like you may have a new virgin or queen on board already.

basic bee bioliogy would suggest to you that there is something wrong in the math when you have queen cells but no (worker I would guess) brood.