Straight Comb in Top Bar Hive #2

Four weeks have gone by and Hive #2 has been busy building comb. They have filled up 10 bars with beautiful straight combs, so I feel confident in celebrating the fact that something I did was right.
The trouble is that I have done a couple things different than hive #1 and I will never really know which one or two things worked.

This is the early version of my new bar design. It has a deeper cardboard strip. I have since taken the hint when the bees chewed it down to suit themselves and trimmed them all from a 1/2" to a 1/4" deep. I was happy to see that the bees built supporting comb up to the wood bar. At first it seemed they were going to just build the comb on the edge of the cardboard strip, which would not be good as the comb became large and heavy with honey or brood.

I feel pretty good about recommending my new bar design though, because I have put a couple of the new bars into hive #1 and they are building straight comb on them, in spite of the fact that the comb next to the new bar is crooked.

The queen cell looks a little like the shell of a peanut

I am a little concerned about hive #1. They seem to have a new queen in the making and I don't really understand why. In theory they were left with a new healthy queen when the hive swarmed, twice.
I can only guess what is going on is that the queen they were left with did not get mated because of the really poor weather we have been having, or she was effected by the mite population.
I opened the hive yesterday to find only healthy bees- no wing deformities at all and a queen cell on the edge of the outermost comb that was not there last week. I will be keeping a very sharp eye on them.