Hi all
I often hear that "queens don't last as long as they used to." Here is advice from 1921:

It is getting to be more and more the practice on the part of the best producers in the country to requeen every year. Of course, where a queen has made a remarkably good record, she should be kept over for breeding purposes the following season, but men who are making crops by the five, ten, and fifty tons are finding it a good rule to _requeen at least once a year_.

While the practice is not universal among all the large producers, it is much more common than it once was. Formerly good bee-keepers believed that a colony needed requeening only once in two years; and in many localities with many beekeepers the practice was productive of good results. How much more honey could be secured by requeening every year cannot be told, but a queen more than a year old is liable to fail at a very inopportune time, perhaps causing a loss in earning power many times the cost of a new one.

E. R. Root (1920) The Importance of Requeening Often, Bee World, 2:12, 145-146, DOI: 10.1080/0005772X.1920.11094598

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