Sorry to hear about your luck!! I try to give you a few pieces of novice advise.
Before I try to give you an answer let me ask a few questions
When you say queen cells do you mean fully formed and capped queen cells, not queen cups?
It sounds like you have started down the road to having what is called a "laying worker", it can be a real pain to deal with. If all you see is drone brood, then I'd say that is what it is.
A friend of mine is dealing with it right now. A swarm, that lost its queen, was hived 4 weeks ago, they made a fully capped queen cell that did not produce a queen. It is not too bad at this point, only a few scattered eggs and drone brood, not several eggs in one cell all over the place.
My solution to this problem was to build a shim with two layers of screen and its own 3" entrance, then place the queenless hive above the queenright hive and let it perk for several weeks.
Hopefully the brood and queen pheromones will suppress the laying worker, and she will go back to normal. Then we can combine the hive. I got this advice from this site using the search button, search for "laying worker" there are other methods to solve this problem. Take a look at MB's website (
bushfarms.com) for more info and possible solutions.
To answer your questions:
1) Do I assume that there will be a queen that will come out of the queen cell ? What if the queen that was in there never laid eggs and dies first...could the bees have put a drone in the queen cell ?
No, I would not, I would treat it as a laying worker hive. If a queen emerges above the screen, gets bred and get the hive queen right, then great. If not then you are ahead of the curve.
2) Should I go buy another queen ?
That would likely be a waste of money, time, and effort at this point, not to mention a good queen.
3) Is this hive going to die out first ?
It may not die out, but it may need to be combined with another this late in the season and split next spring.
4) Should I bee feeding them since they are not foraging ?
If they have a reasonable amount of stores, maybe. It can't hurt, and will help them draw out comb. It depends on your nectar flow right now.
Hope this helps and the search for "laying workers" get your ball rolling!!
RKR
I am going to make a better double screened shim today, the first one was made on the fly. I'll try to post a picture or two of it later.