Three questions about the queen, on every visit
You will not see the queen most times you open a hive, and you do not need to. Three readings tell you what she has been doing since you were last there.
Finding the queen is satisfying and mostly unnecessary. On a strong colony in July it can cost twenty minutes and a great deal of disturbance, and at the end of it you know one thing you could have worked out from the frames.
What the frames say instead
Eggs mean she was laying within the last three days. That is tighter evidence than seeing her, because a queen can be present and not laying at all. Open brood widens the window to about a week, capped brood to three.
Queen cells are the second reading, and they are ambiguous on their own. A charged cell in spring is a colony preparing to swarm. The same cell in a colony with no eggs is a colony trying to replace a queen it has already lost. Same object, opposite meaning, and what separates them is whether eggs are present.
The third is her age
A queen’s year is the one thing frames cannot tell you, which is why it is recorded when she is introduced and carried forward from there. A good share of the failures that catch people out are second- and third-year queens going over in the middle of a flow.
Eggs, cells, age. Between them they answer what finding her would have answered, in a fraction of the time and with the hive open for a fraction as long.