> 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.

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