"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."
Well come on by for a visit!
I'm small time so I raise all of my queens, mark them all, and keep simple notes on the side of the hives making it pretty easy to see how old they are.   Out of my 100 hive operation  I have one 2011 white queen and at least 6 queens with 2012 yellow on them right now (well they had paint going into winter!).   Roughly 35% of my operation has 2013 red and the rest is 2014 green.   High mite counts are the largest reason for culling old queens but last summer I replaced a number of 2012 queens for no other reason then that I had to make room for fresh queen cells in nucs.   I know fresh queens are considered better but it sure is hard to pinch the old faithful queens.  Personally I have not been keeping bees long enough to compare to the good old days but I have not seen poor queen issues much in my operation.....or I just don't know what I am missing.   We are in a fairly low pesticide area, hives are very rarely moved, I have never used hard mite treatments and I only dribble or vaporize oxalic acid for mite treatments.   I might see one drone layer each year and have very few hives (1%?) go queen-less in the winter and have never had a hive crash in the summer.    Most of my winter losses have been clear mite issues and the classic stuck cluster too far from the honey.   
These are just observations to share as I don't feel like I have enough experience to make major claims about anything.         
Ryan Williamson 



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