several Paul Hosticka snips followed by > my comments.. 

Dick's opinion that a queen will lay fertilized eggs until she doesn't seems logical to my untrained mind. 

>I should point you to my comments about the stain also detecting 'soon to be non viable sperm'... I have no idea how a queen deals with this but I do wonder.  I have had the same experience with queens showing up in the spring as drone layers and wonder if this is about original sperm viability or cooler temperatures.. we do know queens can live thru pretty cold temperatures but this does not mean the sperm stored in the spermathica does as well. 

My anecdotal experience after raising my own queens for 25 years is that good husbandry is the key. I am not so foolish as to believe that I can select better breeders or that I have superior skills. What prompted my trying my hand at it was the too frequent early supercedures of the Calif. queens I was getting via the mail in small lots of 5 to 20. 

>And of course the cost and timing can also be a problem. Queen superscedure whether from CA or my own still seems to have a seasonal aspect.  So I tend to raise and buy queens during the early spring and late summer and avoid the months in-between  (much of this strategy was original based on what I witness in the article Peter highlighted). Yes I still buy queens from California and I really do not worry a whit as to their color... disposition yes, color no.  < as for me the only benefit of color is those queens unmarked are easier to spot in the hive than a black queen.

The question of shipping is getting a lot of deserved attention and I hope that some additional real research goes into it but my fear is that it will become the latest scapegoat with a lot of beekeepers claiming that their failures are due to UPS or USPS. Along with Charlie I'm quite certain it ain't us.

>Temperature both hot and cold can be a problem.. too hot is normally the problem with shipment but things can go south if the weather is too cold < with too cold the queen may arrive alive and with too hot dead. I am after 55 years of carrying a hive tool and smoker a pretty good beekeeper... or at least some folks think so.  I would however admit I think all the time about how many times I accidentally kill a perfectly good hive.  When you work enough hives even the most skilled beekeeper will squash some or dislocated some..  and then sometimes you just make the wrong call and the hive dies outright.  

>I have also noticed via manipulation of a lot of smallish home grown nuclei when I misplace one frame (typically with a small patch of eggs on one side of a frame) towards the outside of the box at the wrong time of year (early spring when the weather goes back and forth) that this can create the circumstance for what casually looks like superscedure.  And if the nectar flow goes back and forth too radically the bees may actually generate superscedure cells of a perfectly good queen. Of course the notice of a queen cells of whatever kind does not mean a live virgin queen emerges from that cell.  However I do wonder how many reports of failing fall into these same situations?


Gene back in central Texas attending to my bees...   

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