form Jim Fischer...
'What I was graphing was the "career length" of all queens in the operation,
and with a large enough dataset, all things tend to come in "normal
distributions". Hence the name!  :)

But regardless of the graphing, I, like Jeff Pettis, have not seen a 3 or
4-year old queen with my own eyes since 2002.
If anyone else has any, I'm sure we'd all like to hear about it, and so
would various R&D teams.'

It has been some time since my last graduate class in statistics but certainly one thing I do remember is that normal distribution are fairly common in biology (which for good or bad was not really my own field of expertise).  However the math in a queens age distribution I would think would make the graph look somewhat normal with the mode, mean, or average more toward one end of the graph than the other with a short tail on one side and a long tail on the other.  Normal distribution are quite useful in biology but they are not the only distribution form.

Since varroa showed up certainly the life of a hive and queen is somewhat limited (I am guessing from what I have read at or about two years).  As far as not having seen 3 or 4 year old queens I would suggest someone simply need to get out and open more boxes and certainly several of the 'known' no treatment queen rearing folks basic strategy is to rear stock from queens (queen and drone mothers) that survive to 3, 4 and even 5 years old.  I have no doubt that these are rare and perhaps nonexistent in migratory operation but I do see them here from time to time.  Back when I was rearing a few queens for the hobby market I had reports from some of my customers of some of my own queens making it to 5 years.  Much like the lore of the 'old school' beekeepers these 2+ year old queens are not the best when it come to productivity but most will rear a crop of bees and still capture you a box of honey.  One theme of 'old school' beekeeper was that the best thing to do if you wanted to maintain productivity in your hives was to keep young queens in the box.  I suspect that wisdom is as true today as it was then.

Without a doubt how queens are shipped during the season can have dramatic effect on their quality to the end user.  If you have reared queen for even a short period of time you learn pretty quickly that at certain times of the year you ship ground transport and at other time air shipment.  The hazards of shipping condition too cold or too hot are just to obvious to overlook if you wish to have any satisfied repeat customers.

I seem to recall from my own reading that back in the 60's there was a episode of widespread queen superscedure in packages that led to at least one study (a double blind study payed for by the State of Nebraska) and although nothing conclusive was ever found the primary culprit at that time was thought to be nosema a.  Superscedure rates from various known queen rearing folks (who were not informed of the study ahead of time) was found to be from 0 to 100%.  These outcomes when worked backward showed pretty strongly that the queen rearing outfits that use fumidil in the queen cage candy and package syrup had low superscedure rates and the those that did not had much higher superscedure rates.        

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