As for aggressiveness: take this with a grain a salt, I'm no expert, but I think sometimes hives are just "in a mood" for no reason we mere mortals can understand. And I think if you open them when they're in that mood, no matter what you do right or wrong, the ladies will be upset. I generally just stop an inspection when I notice this mood, and come back to them the next day. If I do go ahead and go on with it, if it's a time-sensitive inspection, I double up my layers of long sleeves, put rubber dish-washing gloves on under my cloth ones, and work as quickly as I can. They are always quite angry with me for a few days after I do this, though.
I'd just give the aggressive hive a few days to settle down, but maybe spend a few minutes each day going near it, perhaps speaking to them or touching the outside of the hive, so they keep in mind that you (and your smell) are still around.
As others have said, you have *lots* of time before you will have a laying worker if the queen was lost. LOTS of time. And, from my experience with a laying worker hive, you'll notice a decline in forager population before you reach that point. My understanding (and seems confirmed here by others) is that pretty much all of a queen's brood has to be gone before a laying worker goes "dude, wait, I got this!" So, if you watch your hives daily and kind of know their level of activity, you can see that activity declining, and then maybe worry about your queen and go in inspecting for brood.
As for sugar water, that's what I've started using in my inspections. The idea, for me, is not to use the water like a riot hose, heh, but to keep them occupied with sugar water and damp wings rather than me. I'll smoke just a tiny bit at the entrance and under the lid when I begin an inspection, then I just regularly spritz the hive and the frames for the rest of the time. My smoker is nearby, and going, so I'm sure the scent is in there air and I have it if I need it, but the sugar water alone seems to keep them grooming one another and sucking the sugar off of things rather than flying about being upset.
I got a little spray bottle at the beauty section of a drugstore, I believe it was marketed for dampening hair, I like it because it produces a fine mist that has a wide pattern, so just two squirts will mist an entire frame. I fill it with 1:1 sugar water.
I will also mist carefully towards the center, rather than edges, of the boxes when I'm getting ready to put things back together; it tends to draw the ladies away from the edges so I don't have to worry about squishing them.