Alan, I read with pleasure your well phrased opinion on the perfidies of queen caging/brood breaks. 

Here in the Pacific Northwest we have a biozone not well suited for bees: short season, sparse nectar flows, long rainy winter. There is no good time to have a brood break....as you say the penalties outweigh the gain.

There seems little discussion also of the three hidden penalties: 

1. any time the queen is off-lay the hive is not only "not growing" by her production level per day, that many older bees are also dying per day. It does not take long thereby to seriously deplete a colony.

2. brood breaks skew the age distribution of the bees in the colony. While bees are somewhat elastic at what age-driven colony task they take up, at some point won't they struggle with labour shortages simply due to issues with age distribution?

3. as the last of the brood emerges, and adult mites along with it, the colony per-bee mite level can rise substantially, as it does in late summer, so while brood breaks are often done to create a broodless environment to boost treatment efficacy, one should perhaps only do one in colonies with low mite levels going in. Which means why do a brood break at all?

There are ways to render colonies broodless and keep queens laying. Takes some labour and planning but can be done.

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