How a colony talks to itself
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A colony has no manager. What looks like coordination is a set of chemical signals that each bee responds to locally, and knowing the main ones explains most of the odd behavior you will see.
Chemistry, not decisions
No bee knows the colony needs more foragers. Individual bees respond to the concentration of substances around them, and the colony-level result looks like a plan. This matters practically because it means you can change behavior by changing chemistry, which is what you are doing every time you use smoke or move a frame of open brood.
Queen substance is the big one
A laying queen produces a blend of compounds, passed hand to hand through the colony by the workers attending her. Its presence suppresses worker ovary development and suppresses the impulse to raise new queens.
When that signal weakens, everything changes at once. A colony that is crowded enough to dilute it starts swarm preparations. A colony that loses it entirely becomes audibly different within a day and starts emergency cells. Left long enough without it, workers begin laying, and those eggs are unfertilized and produce only drones.
So swarming, supersedure and laying workers are not three unrelated problems. They are three points on one gradient of the same missing signal, which is why the remedy for all three starts with restoring it.
Alarm pheromone is why the second sting is easier to get
A sting releases a marker that smells faintly of bananas and recruits other bees to the same spot. That is why stings cluster, and why a sting on a glove you keep wearing invites more.
Practical consequences: wash gear that has been stung, do not leave a stung glove next to the open hive, and if you take a sting during an inspection, smoke the site. Smoke masks the signal, which is most of what smoke is doing.
What this changes for you
Give a queenless colony a frame of eggs and open brood, and you have given it both the material to make a queen and the pheromone that stops workers laying. One frame does two jobs.
It also explains why an emergency-queen colony is calmer within a week even before she is laying, and why combining colonies works better with newspaper between them: the delay lets two chemical signatures blend rather than collide.