[Oldtimer]

What Tom said.

What you saw is totally typical when the old queen cannot fly. Takes the swarm maybe an hour before they realise she is not with them & then they return to the original hive.

During the swarming attempt the old queen is chased very aggressively to get her to launch into the air and if she cannot she is sometimes killed. If she is not killed, she will be killed over the next few days during further attempts at swarming. The hive will then swarm properly once queen cells hatch & they can take a virgin with them.

In your situation, best plan would be to make several splits with a queen cell or two each, whether or not you can find the old queen. That's if you catch the hive before it has swarmed proper. Pretty certain there will be queen cells in there if you look hard enough.

 

[Oldtimer]

All that is a judgement call it depends what you have in the hive & how many splits you actually want.

But one thing you DO have to bear in mind is that if you put the splits in the same apiary as the parent hive, many of the bees will drift back to the parent hive. So put more bees than you need in the splits, and absolute bare minimum in the parent hive. Otherwise lots of bees can return, crowd out the parent hive, and it still swarms anyway. Also, make the entrances for the splits very small. It is mainly young bees that have not flown yet that will stay in the splits and they are not old enough for guard duty to prevent robbing. After one week they will be older, doing guard duty, and you can make the entrances bigger if need be.

When positioning the queen cells in the splits, consider the bee population will drop due to drifting, so put the queen cell where the bees will still keep it warm even if there are a lot less bees. So for example if the queen cell is on the bottom of the comb, the bees will abandon it if the population drops so cut it off with a very sharp knife or box cutter or similar, and press it onto a comb where brood is (not onto capped brood it will drop off), in a place where the bees will cluster even if there are not too many left.