Welcome indeed.
If you have kept bees for over 50 years you must have encountered many characters along the way. I think one of the problems beginners have is the apparent certainty many of us inadvertantly slip into when trying to describe what they should do next. It's well-intentioned and probably not putting in too many caveats but as you say things have a habit of taking unexpected and sometimes unwelcome turns.
A recent example was having clipped several hundred queens without incident, this year I discovered a couple of swarm cells in a large colony which had one of the last unclipped queens in it. Having decided to knock down the queen cells, I picked up a particularly bonny queen and having marked her, slightly changed my grip to clip her and she suddenly wriggled free and walked up my hand and disappeared up the back of my forearm. No amount of gyrations or yoga moves revealed her whereabouts.
Assuming she had either flown off, fallen off or wandered onto the back of my suit I checked the grass then carefully moved a few paces and then jumped up and down to dislodge her. No evidence of her on the grass then either so after a bit (in case she was flying around) closed up and left it a few days. Came back - no evidence of new eggs in the hive, queen underneath the floor or emergency cells raised. Waited a week, still no queen, emergency cells or eggs present, so popped in a foil encased queen cell from another hive.
My first mess up when clipping in years and if they had swarmed I would have lost the queen anyway, so no disaster but still mighty careless
I do know that I would have lost countless swarms (and queens) over the years if I didn't routinely clip so its a shrug and move on moment but still felt a bit of a plank