The queen is dead - long live the queen!

Five weeks ago I was looking through someone's hive when we came across this:

Those six elongated structures hanging off the bottom of the comb are queen cells, each one containing a large grub. The three longest cells had just been sealed by the bees so I knew that over the next seven days those grubs would metamorphose into queen bees ... and promptly die!
The reason is simple - there can only be one queen. The old queen (and mother of these queen cells) had swarmed with 10,000 worker bees earlier that day, confident in the knowledge that she was leaving one of these developing queens to take over.
But only one, because the first queen to emerge promptly kills her unborn sisters by stinging them while they are still in their cells. So because most of these potential queens were doomed I didn't hesitate in gently cutting out some of the sealed cells and taking them home to put in the airing cupboard. I was confident they would hatch, but without nursery bees to feed and look after them they would soon perish. The problem was I didn't have enough bees of my own but I knew someone who did....
My beekeeping buddy has some very strong colonies so we shook a mug full of young bees into a tiny hive, then carefully inserted one of the queen cells between the frames using a paper clip for support, and added some fondant icing sugar to keep them fed.
Here's a picture of the little hive sitting on top of a normal hive. Within a few days the queen hatched and despite the poor weather she managed to get mated because when I looked a few days ago she was laying.
Which is just as well, because that hive of bees my beekeeping buddy gave me last week doesn't have a queen!