> I question Pellet's statement that caging a queen in full > lay in some way damages her, until I see some supportive > evidence, rather than "stories." How about more recent anecdotes than 100 year-old ones? 20 years ago, queen laying careers were significantly longer than they are now, and I caged about 400 of my 600 queens every year just before the dearth. The Tulip Poplar would finish blooming, and 200 some colonies would be relieved of their mostly unfinished Tulip Poplar honey supers, and be dragged up into the George and Jeff National Forests to get some sourwood nectar into empty comb, while the rest stayed home to do what they could with the last gasp of clovers before the dearth, and to finish processing the Tulip Poplar into harvestable honey. The queens that stayed home were caged to 1/4 of a medium frame in mid-June with push-in queen cages soldered into "box lids" from queen excluder-sized galvanized mesh, which limited the population during the dearth soon to come, and thus kept the honey crop that much larger. Late July, the cages would come off, to give the colonies time to make some workers for the fall blooms. I was worried about the collateral damage from caging queens, so we randomly caged or did not cage based on coin flips for 3 years before I took the chance to cage every queen. The caged queens did not suffer any apparent symptoms as a result. I had equivalent bell curves for early demise or supersedures, amount of brood in both fall and spring, and colony build-up the following spring. There was not much of a numerical difference, and the centers of the bell curves were about the same, so no statistical difference between caged and uncaged. These were all Carniolans, which are well-known for their rapid reaction to changes in environmental conditions. Carnies rock, so use of carnies could be a significant factor. If anyone else went to the trouble to cage hundreds of queens for multiple years, I never heard of it. I only did it because I had teenage employees, and I had to come up with something for them to do when all moves were done, but no supers were yet ready to pull. Most of them came to me with "references" from the Juvenile Judge, so I felt obligated to come up with reasons for them to consistently be up at dawn earning money, so they would be too tired to be up late at night, causing mischief. A strategically-deployed and judiciously-removed push-in queen cage netted a minimum of an extra 20 lbs of harvestable honey per hive, so the payback was instantaneous if your labor costs were low. I doubt if the same bake-off could be held these days, given the problems with queens even under optimal conditions. *********************************************** The BEE-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html