Kevin found a paper everyone else missed:

http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchObject.action?uri=info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2
Fjournal.pone.0016217&representation=PDF
or
http://tinyurl.com/nc9gnne

The title seemed to be a good explanation for the high supercedure rates
among new queens that we have noticed in uber-urban settings, where local
mating is problematic, and Jeff Pettis (USDA) has noticed when trying to
implement season-long studies.

But the title of the paper ("Viruses Associated with Ovarian
Degeneration...") seems to be flatly contradicted by the plain language of
the findings of the study.  They could find no virus that associated with or
correlated to ovarian degeneration.

The authors also did not find a link between the viruses infecting the
queens and actual queen egg-laying performance as evaluated by the
beekeepers:

"5. DWV Titre In Mated Queen Ovaries is Unrelated to Queen Age, Ovarian
Degeneration or Fecundity Problems

We used RT-qPCR to estimate the DWV titres in all the 130 mated queens
analysed here and related these to their biological and pathological data.
For these analyses, the entire queen was used. Although a very wide range of
DWV titres was observed among these queens, there was no significant
difference in the median DWV titre between queens of different age, between
queens with or without fecundity problems or between queens with yellow
coloration in their ovaries (Table 2 and Figure 4)."

But "extensive lesions that appear at dissection level as masses of
yellowish material in the germinal part of the ovaries." and "masses of
yellowish material in the germinal part of the ovaries" do not seem to be a
good thing at all

However, yellow-colored follicles are supposed to be normal to some extent.
When eggs are laid, the emptied follicle collapses, and produces a "corpus
luteum" ("yellow body") as part of a normal process.  I can only conclude
that what was called "lesions" were in addition to the normal "used
follicles".

This area would be a good target for some more advanced genetics work, in
that the massive numbers of virus particles clogging things up might have
more subtle impact on egg laying, or might only become catastrophic for egg
laying at some very high level of infection.

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