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9 or 10 frames in brood boxes

  • 9

    Votes: 13 20.6%
  • 10

    Votes: 43 68.3%
  • doesn't matter

    Votes: 1 1.6%
  • you got too much time on your hands

    Votes: 7 11.1%

vote for 9 frame brood box vs 10 frame brood box, nothing to do with supers!

11K views 36 replies 22 participants last post by  Beeboy01 
#1 ·
vote for 9 frame brood box vs 10 frame brood box, nothing to do with supers! We all know that 9 in the honey supers makes extracting easier but this is just about the brood box. I run 10 in my brood boxes but it seems like many around me run 9.
 
#4 ·
9 frames in a 10 frame brood box is asking for trouble!! Cross comb will be everywhere and a heck of a mess to clean up!!

Now 9 frames in a 10 frame honey super, combs are drawn out farther making uncapping a breeze!

If you want to experiment on a small scale, put in ten frames and push half the frames to one side of the box and the other 5 frames to the other side of the box resulting in a rather large gap in the center............then see what happens!!
 
#12 ·
Your bees must read different books than ours do -- our experience with evenly spaced 9 frames in a ten frame box resulted in the bees bridging the combs at the top down to 1/4" bee space with comb about an inch from the ends toward the center. Very messy, lots of brace comb in the brood area and drones scattered everywhere. Very lumpy comb, too.

After a couple years my brother cut it all back and removed the spacers, things are much better.

You box also looks to be narrower than ours are -- somewhat less space between the top bars than when we did ours, at least it looks that way.

I'm trying narrow (1 1/4") spacing this year with 11 frames per 10 frame box. Have to covert the hives since I grabbed the wrong nuc box to catch a swarm and the first deep is 1 3/8" spacing, but so far they are happy making nice comb at the correct depth in the box with narrow spacing. Gotta be better than brood combs with a huge space between the brood areas.

Peter
 
#13 ·
Presently I run mostly 8-frame medium boxes and most of my brood boxes have slatted rack inner side walls, which together they take up the space of one frame, this still allows me to fit eight 1-1/4" wide frames into the boxes. It works very well, and since I began doing this, bearding, when it happens, is greatly reduced. Before, there were three of four inch thick beards covering most of the front of the hives, and even on the back of some, now there are still beards, but just scattered bees, not even a complete single layer of bees. This is with SBBs with slatted racks, side slatted racks in the brood supers, excluders, then upper entrances.
 
#14 ·
Different locals and different strains of bees will produce different results. My area has a year round trickle flow and the bees bracing like this is common even on tightly spaced frames. For me nine in a ten frame box wouod make the frames un-removable.


 
#20 ·
I'm gong with Keth and SQKCRK on this one. I run 9 in a 10 frame!

Makes frame removal WAY easy and also less likely to roll the queen. As SQK points out at least 17 if not 18 frames for her to lay in (2 deeps) and I would love to see a picture of someones hive that had 18 frames of brood. :)

The trick to running 9 in a 10 is to get them to draw them all out first by putting 10 in a 10. Then you pull one and space them evenly. I run 17 hives of all different varities and across them all wind up with WAY more brace comb when there are 10 frames in the box.

For me nine in a ten frame box wouod make the frames un-removable.
I have NEVER seen that much brace comb in a hive ever! However, I doubt that they would ever be any harder to remove (even with only having 9) as the wax and brace comb don't do much for holding the frames in. It is the propolis that makes them more difficult to remove. I have several hives that glue them down very well and just as many that don't, most are somewhere in between. Maybe trying a different tecnique to remove them would help... Personally I take the hive tool and very gently "cut" down between the frame spacers to separate the propolis and pry them apart at the same time. Only having 9 frames in the hive makes this technique very easy. Then you can use the hooked end of the hive tool to gently pry them up and out one end at a time. I never cut off the brace comb (unless it is excessive in between a set of frames) as it gives me a great guide for spacing when I put the frames back in.

I purchased several hives this spring that had 10 frames in and they were a nightmare to get out, broke the topbar off several frames in the process of reducing them all down to 9 frames. Since, reducing them down I have had no trouble removing them (even in the hives with excessive propolis).

Of course YMMV.
Good luck,
 
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