A few basic principles here, pasted from my notebooks:

a)  Pollen foraging is increased when there is more open brood, hence the
"Superboost" pheromone product  (Brood pheromone increases the activity of
existing foragers, particularly pollen foragers (Lots of papers by Pankiw on
this 1998, 2001, 2007, 2008, 2009...)  this makes sense, more mouths to feed
motivates more pollen foraging, as fresh pollen is preferred.  If you catch
your pollination client slipping the Superboost things in your hives, pull
the hives and don't look back.  The 2nd law of bee thermodynamics says that
the colonies on "steroids" today are weaker later when moved to its next
contract.  You don't get something for nothing.

b) Nectar foraging is increased by the adding of empty drawn comb, which has
its own pheromone. (Rinder, 1984)  It must be drawn comb, must be empty.
Foundation won't do.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00218839.1984.11100612

c)  Nectar is placed in empty cells in individual drops at first, and
combined as it evaporates and viscosity goes up.  I don't know of a paper on
this, but the point here is that one can never be too rich, too thin, or
have too many supers of drawn comb.  It bears repeating that bees can't fill
supers when they are in the barn, so super up as soon as weather allows, and
"spring" (in terms of reliable dandelions) has moved forward by a full week
in NYC from 2004 to today.

d)  Harvesting and getting extracted supers back on the hive quickly is
another good practice, for the same reason as (c).  A cheap refractometer is
your friend here, you need one in every glove compartment, so that every
team can spot check.  Why wait for the bees to fully cap what you will
merely uncap?  This is a bit aggressive, dubbed "an extractor screams at
midnight", by my late wife, who never was a fan of my round the clock
3-shift continuous flow extracting operation, and the sound of belt-drive
belts squeaking.  So, Harvest Early, Harvest Often.

In terms of "bang for buck", the above is going to do a lot more for the
size of the crop than any amount of queen caging.  Queen caging (for me) was
an add-on to the above.

Combining of a number of swarms is going to increase the number of potential
foragers, but they will be "lazy" unless one also adds supers of empty comb.
I think this may be the wide difference in the results seen from combination
of colonies.

What I always found swarms to be best at was drawing out foundation frames,
if fed well with syrup. Some swarms are diseased, some swarms have crappy
queens,  but they can all at least draw some nice comb.

The impact of reduced brood rearing is only going to help when you have a
rock-solid grasp of the end of the bloom.  This is pretty easy in the
Mid-Atlantic US VA/MD/DC, where Tulip Poplar can soak your hair with nectar
on a blustery day, and they all stop blooming at once, with nothing much
after it.  Here in the City, there are only a few Tulip Poplars, but quite a
few Lindens, which bloom far later and longer.  We have so many because we
lobbied for the planting of Lindens as "street trees" back when bees were
the designated charismatic megafauna serving as the hood ornament on the
environmental movement, and we had a Parks Commissioner who grew up as a
neighbor to the Charles Mraz family in VT, provided me with a free lecture
hall for my all-winter free bee course, and demanded that an observation
hive be present at many Parks social events.  He was succinct.  "Flowers.
Bees.  This is the PRODUCT at Parks."

             ***********************************************
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