I've found myself as something of an accidental beekeeper (yeah, I know). I have wanted a hive for awhile, but a friend of mine pretty much handed me a swarm box the other day and wished me luck. I'm not a total novice in that I've done some courses and some reading and I've got a few friends with hives I help out from time to time.

So I now have a swarm box with 5 frames of bees inside. One of the frames is about 2/3 full of honey, and one has some capped brood. The brood frames were transferred with their nurse bees. There are also two capped queen cells but no live queen. The idea is to hope that this small colony will establish itself. These all come from one of his existing hives. I've had the box in place for a couple of days and the bees do look happy, healthy, and active. Although I haven't opened it up yet to check internally since the check we did before moving them.

So my questions are:

1. Should I open the hive up and mark the existing queen cells in some way? Presumably without a queen the hive may build more queen cells but they won't contain any eggs anyway.

2. Should I leave both the existing queen cells intact? The way I see it one will hatch first and kill the other but having 2 means there's a good chance at least one of them survives.

3. Is it worth supplemental feeding of the small hive? The weather in the UK has been poor and none of the hives around me have done particularly well for honey production this year. I'm thinking that feeding them would be one less thing the bees have to worry about and it may increase chances of survival.

4. Is there really anything I can do to increase the chances of success here? Apparently the odds are 50/50. I mean I can't control for a queen leaving to mate and being eaten by a predator obviously.

Thanks in advance all :)

*edited for formatting.