Yo Debbie,
kick #1; this time of the year is not the best time in NC to be exposing honey especilly if you live in the Piedmont area......BUT if you
must (ie) taking off your honey, always insure that your supers are completly covered, top and bottom......I use old hive outer covers, one to set the super (s) in and one to put over the top of the supers. When I srape the the burr comb it all goes into a sealed container.......
Lastly, don't tally to long at one hive, do what you have to do and move on, preferably to the other side of the bee yard .
suggestion #1 This time of year can be a trieing time to requeen as you have found out, one of the biggest problems is, aside from hungry boared worker bees is this is the time of year when the hive population is at it's highest......BUT there are a number of ways to find the queen in this maze, the first is luck, hope can find her on those first few frames,
second, if you are running a single hive body system remove the hive body from the bottom board, replace it with an empty hive body,add two frames of drawn comb shake the bee off of the 10 frames from the original brood chamber into the new brood chamber, install a queen excluder over new brood camber and put the old brood chamber on top of the queen excluder....the next morning remove the top brood chamber and inspect the two frames in the bottom chamber for your old queen, pinch her head, put the hive back the way it was originally, 12 to 24 hours later you can in stall your new queen......
Steve