a Mr Bromenshenk snip..
In the mid-1970s, I performed a large experiment in Helena, MT.  All of the colonies were established from packages delivered by a commercial beekeeper who re-stocked every spring.  He'd fly his plane to CA to oversee the packing, then he had a reefer haul the hives back to Wolf Point.  He dropped off 65 packages to me in Helena and his crew helped us hive them - so the bees were all in their new homes in less than 1 hr, and had been packaged the day before.

We marked the queens and did frequent inspections.  This was before varroa.  About 28% of the colonies replaced their queens before end of that summer.

 We wrote the study up as a technical report to EPA, who funded it.  The queen loss was equivalent across controls, treatments, etc.  It did not correlate with treatment.  

Now here's the kicker.  I was NOT ABLE to publish the study in any of the bee journals - the reviewers assumed that the high queen loss was my fault - poor management.  They all believed that queens were good for 2-3 years, anything else had to be the fault of the beekeeper.   

Translation - they'd never marked queens for a longitudinal study.  About the same time, Jim Bach, the WA State Apiculture Inspector started seeing the same problem of queen failures and replacements.  It took him several years to get anyone to pay attention.

Thus, this is NOT new.  And it's not transportation - the reefer kept the packages cool and he had good ventilation.  I didn't see anything else that sophisticated until I saw Ray Olivarez's trucks for package delivery a few years ago.

my comments...
not to far distant from Jerry's date above there was an event largely observed in East Texas (there is a lot of migratory bees kept there) and Louisiana (state law there forbids bring in bees on anything besides new equipment so most of these would be home grown set down kind of beekeeper) of an event that became known as disappearing disease or absconding disease.  By verbal description it sounded almost exactly like CCD.... that is on a prior inspection the bees looked fine but when the beekeeper returned on the next visit the bees had vanished.  Cause was never really established but there were clues and of course rumors*.  During the same time there was widespread reporting of failing queens so the state of Nebraska purchased packages from well know producers without the producers knowledge as to what was the end purpose.  Packages were established in new equipment and fed and the hives were monitored for superscedure or an attempt at queen replacement.  The data was presented in a spread sheet in the ABJ (sorry if I cannot recall the exact date of reference) and it was very startling.   The range in superscedure rates varied from 0 to 100%.  If my memory is still correct???? Roy Weaver put himself on the map as the one producer who had no queens that were superceded and Charlie Marzz had all of his queen superceded < much later in time Michael Palmer when I inquired about this would tell me that Charlie had in that same time frame farmed out his queen rearing to another person.  After looking at the data and going back and reviewing the process of all of the package suppliers 'the cause' was indirectly identified as nosema a. or shipping stress..... the only real distinction between the 100% failure rate and the !00% success rate was the use of fumidillian in the queen mating nucs and the package syrup.

ps... I do read current articles in the ABJ where supposedly knowledgable people report wide spread loss in queen instillation.  I do have to wonder when I read such article if the underlaying cause is not more about the lack of experience of the people installing the queens or is it the queens themselves < on occasion when folks write stuff down you do get the idea that perhaps they are not totally knowledgeable concerning some of the more nuanced aspect of beekeeping.  I would suspect at least at the extremes (ie 100%) loss that it is something beyond the beekeeper control taking place.

*the gossip in the rumor mill at the time was at about the same time the Baton Rouge beekeeping lab had lost some africanized stock that they were working with.  a decade later in working bees along the Mississippi River I did encounter some extremely hostile bees and when I reported this to the second generation commercial operator I was working for seasonally he related to me the 'rumor'.

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