>Michael: Do you think the unnatural size causes us to be more accustomed to 10 frames in a 10 frame box?
Bees are larger mostly because of the size of the cell on the embossing. Yes, bigger bees build thicker combs (see Baudoux's work)
http://books.google.com/books?id=i0...Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=baudoux cell size&f=false
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesnaturalcell.htm#combwidth
Here is some naturally spaced comb by a regular package of commercial bees that moved into a feeder:
http://www.bushfarms.com/images/BroodNestInFeeder.JPG
and after cutting off the combs here is the spacing:
http://www.bushfarms.com/images/CombSpacing30.JPG
30mm is between 1 1/8" and 1 3/16". A standard hoffman frame is 1 3/8". My "narrow" frames are 1 1/4"
> I realize that in the wild the bees have sizes all over the map, but when Huber was making his measurements, was he not dealing with a smaller bee?
No. The same bee we have.
> Would we have to regress bees to get a comfortable 11 frames in a box?
No, it's what they naturally want to build.
>I personally like putting 10 frames in my brood areas, and 9 above to make things simpler in extraction. (still use queen excluders in my Langstroth hives)
The bees will build honey combs very thick and that makes it much easier to uncap.
>As for my top bar hives, I vary the width by the size of the bars. However, if I get around to building the Warre hives this year I'm wondering if I should try for a smaller spacing as those will be foundationless.
I would do 1 1/4". Baudoux's measurement of natural small cell comb thickness is roughly 20mm and that leaves 12 mm between the combs for "beespace".
>1: Stainless steel wire. This is nothing new to the beekeeping community, and appears to be standard practice depending on foundation used.
I have used wire (I usually don't). I prefer to crimp it. It spreads the forces out more and the comb is less likely to break right along the line of the wire. The reason I don't like wire is it gets in the way. When I want to cut the comb for comb honey or I want to cut out a queen cell, there always seems to be a wire in the way.
>2: Monofilament fishing line. There seems to be some disagreement on the line size required to prevent chewing through it, but from a few searches, i gather that 20lb or higher should be adequate.
I've never tried it, but apparently it works.
>3: "super lines" (spyderwire/fireline..etc): I didn't see any mention of these particular lines used in this capacity.
I think smoother is better in a bee hive. You could use "tiger wire" that is used for jewelry, which is a steel cable with plastic coating. But I prefer to use nothing...