Interesting discussion with a mix of what we use to believe and what we now believe with not much real information to fully inform anyone if there is a trend or not.  I myself BELIEVE that a lot of the old stories concerning queen living to advanced age was more like 'fishing tales' than anything associated with data.  Secondly I am not certain the distribution of queen maximum age has ever been a normal distribution (ie a bell shaped curve) and finally if there is any real information I could toss on this question it is > summer before last we had a undergraduate student (he now is in the graduate entomology program at Illinois... very sharp young fellow) that did a research project collecting drone semen (basically from all of my out yards) and then using some technology out of the vet school here (it is basically the same technology used for determining viability of race horse semen) and by using some form of stain could determine viable sperm, inviable sperm and a intermediate form that would soon be nonviable.   His results at least suggest to me why a queen useful life may be limited since sperm viability in many of the yards was quite low.  I will add here that my impression at the time that this data results was more about nutrition than anything else since we collected the drones as nutrition in the field was falling (summer) and since all of my yards are very remote and I don't treat so any potential chemical contamination should be inconsequential* (in the not so distant past I have had test of pollen and wax in my hives tested and contamination level of all the beekeeper applied products is quite low). 

Just to inform everyone here I am the chief apiarist at the Texas A&M Bee Lab working for Dr Julian Rangel.  Beyond the small task of looking after the bees and keeping the lab supplied with bees I maintain about 200 hives in about 15 yards here in Central Texas.  On rare occasion I do some educational/training work for BWeaver.

*certainly I would not discount or exclude chemical contamination in all the reports I see of queen failure but I would think everyone should also notice how many new folks are selling queens with little or no experience in doing this very detailed task.

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