One of my hives (Langstroth) seemed to be dwindling, with no new brood (so the queen was gone;) I bought a new queen (which arrived Friday), but when I went to install her, I found the hive empty except for some wax moth. I've cleaned the wax moth up, but now I've got a queen bee and no hive to add her to.
I've got a top-bar hive that's very healthy, and was thinking of taking some young workers from that and using them to start a new hive with the new queen. The bars in the top-bar are not the same size as the frames in the Langstroth, so I can't just take some frames from it. I can give the new colony some food, in the form of either crystallised honey or sugar syrup, but it's getting very late in the season to be splitting a hive. The bees would have to build comb for the queen's eggs, too.
Is it too late to start the new colony?