I have been keeping bees first as a hobbist and commercially (working for others) since the early 1960's

If you read back thru any of the old text (going back as far as the days of Jay Smith... 1920 and 30') the consensus was then that if you wished to maximize honey production and minimize your problems the first advice was 'keep young queens in your hives'*.  As far as folks I would pay attention to this though was almost universal and even as late as the 1980 when I worked for a commercial honey/package producer this line of thinking was part of that second generation beekeeper's business plan.  There was talk (largely by folks that you didn't know if they knew what they were talking about or not) of queens living to 5 to 7 years but a lot of that talk sounded more like 'fish stories' than anything else.  Meanwhile in the commercial migratory operation I worked for a two year old queen was about done and the age of the average queen was more like one year.  Intensive management and movement back and forth were simply hard on queens.

What I do here... recently I have stepped aside in my job at the Texas A&M Bee Lab and over the past several years have only reared queen for myself (time limitation imposed by the lab meant something had to give which was my 'for sale' queen rearing activity).  So this coming year the plans are to again begin rearing a few queens for sale again.  I am a no treatment beekeeper so the drone mother part of my selection is based on the age of the queen in the box.... any thing excess of 2 years is acceptable with most of the selected drone mothers being 3 years old and some small number as old as 4.  In the past for the queens I wanted to sell I have used II queens with some trait I wanted to promote.... sometime docile nature and sometime hygienic behavior.  For the queens I wish to use for myself I use the best and oldest queen I have in my inventory for grafting purposes.

*ps... for the new beekeeper or hobbyist I suspect this is still excellent advice.

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