Fairly recent work shows how unreliable requeening with cells is:

In order to stimulate supersedure of old or failing queens beekeepers use several methods. They may introduce a ripe queen cell (induced supersedure) or a virgin queen in the colony (‘Virgin drop’). In this way the old queen remains in the colony while a new queen is introduced. 

This is in contrast to conventional requeening, in which the resident queen is removed and replaced with a mated queen (Johansson & Johansson 1971). Stimulating supersedure compared to conventional requeening has the benefit that it is cheap, since production of mated queens is not needed. 

In 50 colonies we introduced queen cells with one-day-old larvae and capped queen cells. Although many larvae were fed initially, few of them were reared to mature queens and none of the cases resulted in supersedure. This suggests that supersedure cannot be evoked by artificially bypassing the initial phases of the process. 

Therefore, supersedure is only expected when the loss of fitness due to decreased reproduction of the old queen outweighs the loss of fitness due to the decreased relatedness with the progeny of the new queen. In practise we observed that bees kill immature or mature young queens as long as the old queen is considered good enough. 

Stimulating natural supersedure of honeybee queens, Apis mellifera 
Harmen P. Hendriksma, Johan N.M. Calis & Willem J. Boot
Laboratory of Entomology, Wageningen University, P.O. Box 8031, 6700 EH Wageningen, The Netherlands 
PROC. NETH. ENTOMOL. SOC. – VOLUME 15 – 2004

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