No broodless window in southern Spain — is caging the queen to get a clean varroa treatment worth the risk?

Andalusia, ten years, 22 colonies. The northern threads about timing a treatment for the broodless period are lovely to read and completely inapplicable here. My colonies have brood twelve months a year. Some years there's a two-week lull in December if it turns properly cold, and some years there isn't, and I can never plan around it. The technique I keep circling is caging the queen — confining her so that after the existing brood emerges the colony is artificially broodless, and then treating. Italian beekeepers I've met use it routinely and are convinced. My hesitations: it's a lot of handling, it costs weeks of laying at a time of year when I'd rather the colony was building, and I've heard of queens being balled on release or superseded afterwards. Has anyone here actually run caging versus not caging in a Mediterranean climate and compared the spring result? And for those who do it, when in the season do you cage — autumn, or wait for the coolest part of winter?