Need advice/thoughts
NW Louisiana. On Tuesday (5/13), I checked one of my strongest hives (both deeps) and found no queen or evidence of a queen. There was maybe a combined total of a frame of capped brood throughout the bottom box. Yesterday (5/14) I put a new queen in the bottom box and they immediately flocked to her and started tending to her. Before closing the hive I decided to check the super to see how honey was coming along. There were 2 solid frames of eggs, 1 egg per cell. I looked through all 10 super frames 3 times and did not find a queen. I looked back through the deeps and found a handful of random eggs throughout the hive in no pattern. Checked both deeps again and found no queen. Today I again checked every frame twice. Still no queen or new signs. They had started building a queen cell on one of the super frames. No new eggs. Still tending to the new caged queen. I knocked down the queen cell and moved those frames to a super on a different hive in hopes of encouraging that hive to build out frames faster.
I wondered at first if it was a laying worker, but the neatness of the egg laying plus the fact that they built a queen cell for one of them seems to rule that out. I’m at a loss and am looking for suggestions.