A bee frame is an important tool for every beekeeper. Its size will determine the comfortable stay of the dwellers in the hive, and thus how much harvest you collect. Correct dimensions of the bee frame ensure its ease of usage, high efficiency in pumping honey, and convenience for its dwellers.
Principles of frame arrangement in the hive
The hive is organized in such a way that bees can build honeycombs guided by the places the apiarist wants them to be located. The volume of the hive depends on the quantity of frames in the nest. If you put fewer frames than it's planned, the bees will drive out their comb. This can be a nightmare to solve afterward.
Monitor that your hives are with a sufficient number of frames. Exceptions may be cases when the beekeeper decides to put 1 less frame to have enough space to conduct the inspection. If the frames in a 10-frame brooder jam and stick together making servicing of the hive complicated, beekeepers can reduce the frames, usually to 9. It gets more convenient to extract the first frame and then the rest. This approach is acceptable as long as you place the frames evenly.
What is the most appropriate formula for placing frames?
Some beekeepers believe that 9 frames is a convenient way to maintain the hive, and this small extra room between the frames allows the bees to pull the honeycomb much deeper. This way 9 frames can produce more honey than 10.
Other beekeepers argue that even 10 frames in a 10-frame hive is already too much room between the frames than the bees need, and if you leave a lot of room between the frames, you will end up with irregularly shaped combs or even an extra honeycomb.
The followers of 9 frame theory in a nesting body are guided by the fact that the bees will have more room to club, less reason to swarm and you will not lose bees when opening the hive. But it can require some more bees to heat the brood, more honeycombs are built up in uneven shapes and more bees fall off the frame when you remove it.
The irregular shape of the honeycomb is formed because the honey storage cell can be of different thicknesses, but the brood cell is always the same. As a result, when bees have honey and 9 frames, they use an extra space for filling honey. In case they have brood, the cells will not be as thick as for honey.
One solution is that after removing the cells, you can put less frames to a 10-frame hive, which will be even better with the cells being thicker.
So nine or ten?
If you have 10 frames at the beginning and you want to keep 10, you must be ready for more frequent care like scraping off extra wax and growing propolis. At this point, the frames can widen in an uncontrolled manner, turning into a solid unit. And, of course, this will lead to inconvenience in maintaining the hive.
If you start with 9 frames and plan to increase the number to 10, it's a more complicated process because you have to fight against the wide honeycombs that the bees have already built. In the apiary, you will see wider combs in the areas for keeping honey. Brood areas are usually built of normal width, as the dimensions of the brood don't vary much.
The choice is always up to the honey farmer to choose the option that is convenient and suitable for the bees. You can experiment putting 9 and 10 frames in hives of the same dimensions to see how this affects bee behavior, honeycomb shape and honey production.