> I am not convinced we have more queen problems now than people had 100
years ago.  

Many have been convinced for quite some time, my own experience in my early
years certainly did not include re-queening the same hive more than once a
year, something that has become far more common of late.

A significant number of R&D hours and dollars have been spent on the problem
since the mid-2000s, most of the studies including Dave Tarpy of NC State
and Jeff Pettis (who has gone from head of the USDA Flagship Beltsville Bee
Lab after Mark Feldlauer quit in disgust over politics, to having the title
"Whistleblower" forced upon him and being forced out of that job because of
politics, to becoming president of Apimondia, which one presumes was
"politics" far more to his liking) has been working on this issue with
others for the last decade, and has eliminated a lot of possible causes of
this very real and relatively recent problem.

The problem is that so few beekeepers who were keeping bees before 2000 are
still doing so.

The most recent work on the issue is here:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0493-x
Paywalled, so here's a link to the full text.  ("Information wants to be
free."  ...and free of those cartoonish tracking pixels/cookies, too.)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YaJXsa4j2acqZhirnLtGlt0COT2Py6_S/view?usp=s
haring
https://tinyurl.com/y4l6ogub

Roger Patterson has a very good overview of the stark difference and the
scale of difference between "before" the 2000s and "after" seeing the same
problems in at least the UK and the USA.
http://www.dave-cushman.net/bee/queenperformanceproblems.html
https://tinyurl.com/y64ykakj

In Manhattan, there still just aren't enough hives, and hence drones to
dependably mate a queen.  So, queen failure is far, far easier to detect
than in locations where the bees might quietly supersede without notice.
The problem may someday go away in Brooklyn and Queens, but bees cannot fly
across either the East River or the Hudson to Manhattan. Wind.

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