> In both cases the queens abdomen was shrunk up so small she looked like a
worker but as she was color marked I knew it was the old queen.  In both
cases the hive had a laying queen the day I found the old queen dead.  > Did
the bees simply stop feeding the old queen once they had a new queen and she
starved in a day or two?

I've seen lots of mother-daughter hives with both laying, roughly 10% of my
hives had mother-daughter queens, the acid tests being annual fall
requeening, and either finding a non-marked queen first, and knowing to keep
looking for the marked one, or the distinct lack of interest in a caged
queen laid atop the brood chamber in a recently de-queened hive.  

As no queen was more than a year old, the bees apparently did not mind the
extra queen, and if you think about it, 100% + 30% = 130%, so the marginal
costs is tiny and the advantage high of keeping a 2nd queen, even if a
relatively poor performer.

I never ran any of the pathetic mongrel so-called "locally adapted" queens
offered by small scale operators with a few dozen hives, I ran nothing but
the best copies I could get of Sue Cobey's NWCs, perhaps the perfect bee for
apples, as when you toss in a pollen patty, and put on a top feeder in the
still-snowy months of early spring, you have to jump back to avoid being
knocked off your feet by the explosive colony expansion.

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