I have a russian queen that we tore apart a 5 frame Nuc 9 times looking for an never could find her, so i intorduced another russian to the Nuc thinking they were queenless. Needless to say they killed her through the queen cage. The other queen was supposed ot be marked and when i DID find her, she had just a tiny speck of blue paint on her. They had cleaned it off of her and the Nuc seller never could find her and me and another beek couldn't either. She was there. One of the best ways I have ever decided that a hive was queenright is chaining. Are they making wax? That generally tells me that they a.) have the ability to make a queen b.) are queenright c.) or thinkthey have all the above. Interestingly enough, every hive for me that has been chaining has a queen. I recently had a split where i could NOT find her in the hive in a single medium. I grabbed another hive and went up there and started pulling the frames apart 1 by 1 and noticed a bunch of bees UNDER the Screen Bottom board. I took the entire hive off its SBB and put it on a Solid BB and turned the other bottom board over and there she was....below the sbb...UNDER THE HIVE hanging on to the screen. I let her crawl onto my hive tool as she looked like a virgin and set her on the frames in the hive. She flew away on me never to be seen again...or so I thought. About 5 days later i checked the hive beside that one and they already had 2 laying queens and then, magically, they had another. She looked oddly familiar. I grabbed her up after being stung by her and put her in a cage and put her back into the origional hive i thought she came from. They were excited, in a good way so I just released her. She went right in, they accepted her and all is well here about 6 days later. Checked on them yesterday and she is good.
You said above you saw eggs. You just have a runny queen i bet.......look for the eggs. I am like you, it took me a LONG time to accept eggs as a queenright hive, but i had to learn instead of tearing it apart to find a queen. She is there i bet!
Dev