I had a hive that was queenless and attempted to help them make one by supplying frames of egss and larvae. It took two tries to succeed. The first batch of queens hatched but no mated queen made it back to the hive. I also had my strongest hive loose the queen. Maybe my fault. They also produced supercedure cells that hatched and again no queen resulted. I'm wondering of some what is being noticed is a combination of normal queen mortality in conjunction failed matings as a result of diminished/nonexistent feral colonies. Maybe fewer drones make the queen an easier target for predation? Maybe the drone congregation areas are not all teeming with drones and the queen doesn't get fertilized. In many areas the overall population dynamics are totally different from previous years as a result of the population crash caused by varroa.