During the madness of jumbling up the supers and brood frames, my ultimate solution was to split the colony. Failing to think on my feet, I choose to put half of the frames in a new hive, working on the basis of creating an artificial swarm. The basic idea was to end up with one original hive (with a queen) and one new hive (with no queen).
All wonderful. Except I totally forgot to check that the 'new' colony had either queen cells or sufficiently young larvae to allow the bees to bring on a new queen.
Bugger.
Time will tell.
Super photo from http://www.beemaster.com/site/honeybee/qpage.htm a really useful site.
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