Yearly requeening does not really select for shorter queen life.  But, in the absence of selection pressure most traits tend to revert to whatever the mean happens to be.  So, suppose you had a strain of bees that had been selected for long lived productive queens and raised queens from that strain without regards to productive life of the queen mothers.  What you should expect to see is reversion to whatever the normal productive life would be for a honey bee over a number of generations.

Or you could raise queens from that strain paying close attention to only using queen mothers that had demonstrated a long productive life.  If you requeened with such queens you should expect to see productive life hold constant or go up.

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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