Do elephants ever get anaphylactic shock from bee stings, or have allergy to bee stings (ie a much more severe reaction). Perhaps it's a cargo-cult type learning?
When a hive becomes queenless, it begins humming differently (demonic chords). This sound change is a good indicator (to an observant beekeeper) that it is in chaos and should be left alone. Drives mammals away — the sound is EERIE (think of a cheezy 1920's vampire movie's soundtrack).
They're fanning their wings to try to spread the [missing] queen's pheromones -- they're searching for their queen. This also serves the purpose of informing the other bees that they don't have a queen. This in turn will cause nurses to look for eggs they can raise queens from by feeding them royal jelly.
This kind of over dramatizing is tiresome. "Demonic chords" (what's a demonic chord, anyway? Are bees buzzing in a tritone? Are bee hives playing chords?), talking about it sounding like a 1920's vampire movie, etc. Sure makes it sound like nothing in the world could be more creepy.
Then you go and watch a video demonstrating this effect, and it's more like the humming/buzzing sound from the hive is... slower. That's it. It's just slower, lower frequency.
It's not that different. If you're doing a split then you can either find the queen and put it in the new hive, or you can just split the hive without looking for the queen then listen to hear which hive is queen-less -- you can hear the difference in that case. But it's not that huge a difference that if you open a hive you can instantly say "oh oh, this one is queen-less".
