> My interest in historical information is to gain better perspective, not
to compare its validity to current thinking....
> I spend very little time pondering the merit of what I do, what is more
useful, etc.

I was told by a very reliable source via email that Roger Morse published a
Florida extension pamphlet some 50 years ago that did roughly the same thing
I did - a multi-season bake-off between pre-dearth caged queens and
controls, and came to the same conclusion.

As this is historical information that clearly DOES have merit and
application in modern beekeeping, maybe it can be found.  

But caging queens is a risky game very similar to "drone brood removal", in
terms of the need for prompt removal, and has the added risk of being a
weather-triggered process rather than a matter of just counting days, as
with drone brood development.  

I had it somewhat easy, as the dearth in the mountains of Virginia was very
predictable.  Not so with the weather patterns we have today, as springs and
falls do not spring and fall when they used to, and are becoming ever more
"random" from a beekeeping perspective.  The falls are now later, the
springs are earlier.   There are limits to how small one wants a colony to
get during the dearth, so caging the queen has absolute limits regardless of
what the weather does.

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