I have had that dream. Where you are talking care of something and the queen flys off. In the dream, I friggin was chasing her everywhere, for some reason, inside my house. As I was trying to catch her she was banging into windows trying to get out and someone else was trying to squish her...dang, did I say dream??
In reality, I have now dealt with this situation 2x.
1. I had capped swarm cells, I spent over an hour looking thru this hive to find the queen to make a quick split. When I found her running around on a frame, I pulled her out, and put her in a nuc with a couple of frames of hives, I know she was in there as I was very careful and watching her as I put the frame in there and closed up the hive. When I went back to the parent hive to rob a couple of queen cells to help a laying worker issue in another hive, when I was done dealing with the parent hive, I went back to show my queen to my neighbor since she asked to see her.....couldnt find her. Thought well there are a lot of bees in there, no biggie. Two days later, my neighbor calls me as I am at the park with my kids and tells me "you have a swarm jumping off in your back yard right now!" I ran home, they were still flooding out the entrance of the hive and flying. They started to form on a branch in a tree farther back in the yard. I capped them and put them in another hive. I went back to the nuc that I had put the queen in...still no sign of her, no signs of eggs, but 2 queen cells open on the bottom and being closely maintained. So yes, they can return even though they took flight.
2. The queen flew off of a piece of comb I had from out of a cut out. I saw her fly off and I panicked! She quickly landed on the ground below me and I did a fireman slide down the ladder. I pciked her up, put her in the hive and watched her crawl in, then resumed my cut out. Then next day, all the bees were back in the wall in a big cluster and the hive was empty. Grrrrrrr...still working on this cut out, but life happens and sometimes a challenge is a good thing.
So keep your head up, all is not lost and most of the time, the bees know what they are doing even when we don't.
C2