Easy Cut Comb Honey: No extra equipment, similar management

摘要

I am a small scale beekeeper (never more than 20 hives) and I sell all my honey from my home. I live and keep my bees beside the Credit River in The Forks of the Credit, Ontario Canada, about 60 miles northwest of Toronto. I use standard 10 frame langstroth hive bodies with only nine frames. My reasoning, which has been confirmed many times helping others with their bees, is that you can hardly remove frames (self spacing) from 10 frame brood boxes without gelignite or some other brute force method.My honey supers (mediums) are all equipped with nine-frame frame spacers. I still use the four-frame stainless extractor I bought more than 30 years ago which presents a problem in that there is always one frame left over after two loads are extracted. Iconsidered going to eight-frames in each box as I had read that more honey is stored in eight-frames than in nine or 10. However I recently read that the number of frames per box should be consistent throughout the hive to help with ventilation (the spaces between the frames should line up from top to bottom of the hive). As most of my hives are singles I thought that eight frames for brood is too limiting.