Thanks for reaching out with this beekeeping question! I wasn't sure if it could be a mating sign (part of the drone endophallus left after mating), so I reached out to Zachary Huang, Ph.D. Here is his response:

"I think it is way too small and thin to be a mating sign, which is usually shorter, thicker, and whitish in color. It also does not look part of the intestine if she stung another queen and got pulled out. But there is a small possibility that it is the small intestine, if the rectum was attached to the stinger-complex and that was still attached. However, queen stinger is not barbed like a worker’s so it is less likely to be remaining inside another bee or animal. The most likely structure would be fecal material forming this temporary structure."

Feel free to respond with updates. Happy beekeeping!

I checked on this hive on Saturday, so about 2 weeks later. I could not find the queen. I checked again today the 14th. It is a single deep without a ton of bees.

What I did find was disturbing. The larva doesn't look like it is developing. In the one photo I pulled two out for examination. I don't have great vision so I have a hard time seeing eggs. When I look at the photos it almost looks like eggs, or maybe a reflection.

I don't know if the bees are sick or if there is/was a queen issue. I could put a frame of eggs and nurse bees it the hive if I know there isn't anything seriously wrong. Or if they are not sick I could combine them in another hive.

Thoughts

Thanks for following up and for sending photos. It can be a little tricky to see what's going on just by looking at pictures and without seeing the frames, but I see signs of laying workers. I see some cells with eggs on the sides of cell walls or multiple eggs per cell. I also see drones emerging from worker-sized brood cells.

We don't expect laying workers to raise a new queen or accept a new queen. A good option for dealing with laying workers is to combine it with another colony.

There are many ways to do combinations, but one way that I find to be easy and usually successful is to do a newspaper combination. Here are the steps:

1. Identify a queenright colony, ideally stronger in population than the colony in your pictures. If you have multiple brood boxes of laying workers, you can optionally identify more than one queenright colony for the combination. A beekeeper may prefer to combine a laying worker colony with multiple queenright colonies to avoid making a colony a tall tower of brood boxes.

2. Place a single sheet of newspaper above the broodnest of the queenright colony. The newspaper allows the colonies to get used to each other’s scent while the clean out the newspaper. You can make a few tears in the newspaper with my hive tool to get the bees started.

3. Put the brood boxes from the colony in your pictures above the newspaper. Give the bees an entrance by propping up a box or cover.

4. If you have supers on either hive, you can just stack them on top.

5. Check the combined colony in about a week or so.

If you don't have any other queenright colonies, you could consider getting a nuc from another beekeeper for the combination.

Let me know if you have any updates since you last submitted the question or if you have any follow-up questions.

Happy beekeeping!