"There's no good way for humans to measure a single queen's pheromones in
the hive"

I am not so sure this is 100% true.  I read a short piece written by a guy who makes II queens that may contradict this statement.  What he wrote was he banked virgin queens and noticed bees clustered on some virgins considerably more than others.  This was even true if he swapped positions with a highly clustered virgin and a lightly clustered one.  The bees would move with the queen.  He noticed that in general those which seemed highly attractive to the bees tended strongly to be the ones that were not superseded rapidly after insemination.  This makes me wonder of banked fertilized queens might show the same effect?

This caught my attention as perhaps it might be possible to select for high production of pheromones resulting in lower supersedure problems.  But, like any other genetic trait in bees it is easy to talk about the idea and much harder to implement.

Dick
" Any discovery made by the human mind can be explained in its essentials to the curious learner."  Professor Benjamin Schumacher talking about teaching quantum mechanics to non scientists.   "For every complex problem there is a solution which is simple, neat and wrong."  H. L. Mencken

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