>What it has pretty well completely solved is queenless hives.

Completely agree that indiscriminately flooding a yard with ripe queen cells could likely help that yard's queenless rate. But that could happen even if every queen-right hive in that yard rejected their cells and not a single colony was superseded by a new queen. 

I can understand how it might be worth it to reduce your queenless rate and save the labor as long as the numbers work. According to Andy's video (after min 14), he just removes the feeder jar drops the ripe cell into the hole in the cover, and replaces the jar. But then again he raises 40,000 queen cells per year and I'm betting his unit cost makes his numbers much more manageable even when his claim of a 60% take rate means 40% of his cells are wasted. Saving the costs associated with mating out queens must be attractive also. 


If reducing queenlessness is the issue, I wonder if it might be better to scan a yard with an infrared camera and try to ID the queenless colonies and then just add a cell to those. Or scan a yard, drop a cell in every colony then compare a before and after scan to see if a pattern develops that would indicate a supersedure is happening. 

See Jerry's article:  

http://www.beeculture.com/infrared-the-next-generation-in-colony-management/

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