Today, hives come in several standard sizes. One thing they all have in common is removable frames. Removable frames allow one to take a frame out of the hive to examine the comb, look for brood, or extract honey. All without serious injury to the hive. But it was not always so. Prior to 1851 beekeepers had to destroy the comb when extracting honey. That was because comb was formed naturally by the bees, and there was no way to get to the honey without permanently removing the comb.
On October 30, 1851, Lorenzo Lorraine Langstroth had a "Eureka" moment as the solution to a beekeeping problem he had been wrestling with came to him. He immediately wrote it up in his private journal, which is now at Cornell University. His ideas was for a hanging frame that is removable from the hive. A frame that would enable the beekeeper to take out a frame of honey from the hive and check the condition of the hive, and extract the honey without destroying the hive itself. Based on his experiences, Langstroth then published the first book on beekeeping in the United States. It was called Langstroth on the Hive. It was published in 1853, and featured an introduction by A. I. Root.
Langstroth also popularized the concept of bee space. This was another great advance in beekeeping. Basically, bee space is 5/16 of an inch. Langstroth noticed that if a space within the hive is greater than 3/8 inch the bees will build comb in that space. If the space is under 1/4 inch the bees will fill it in with propolis. He took this knowledge and used it in configuring the size of his hive. He designed the dimensions of the frame so that when ten frames are put within the hive body, bee space is preserved. Removable frames that preserved bee space revolutionized beekeeping.
In 1878 A. I. Root began publishing his own book on beekeeping. It was originally called the ABC of Bee Culture. It went through many editions over the years, and eventually became the ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture. In the 1890's A. I. Root noticed that beekeepers were not very good at evenly spacing the frames. That meant that the gaps were not uniform, and that bee space was violated. Root surveyed beekeepers throughout New York and considered two variations. One was the Quinby frame, named after its inventor, Moses Quinby. Quinby frames stood on the bottom of the hive and had a constant width that helped make them self spacing. But, the Quinby frames still violated bee space because there was no bee space back of the end bars. The other design was called the Hoffman frame. Root liked this design, with a slight modification. He began selling these modified Hoffman frames, and the basic design is still in use today. They hang down from the top instead of resting from the bottom like the Quinby frames did. The self-spacing aspect to the frames makes it easy to maintain bee space using ten frames in a standard sized hive body.
But this is not the end of the story. Beekeepers usually designate the bottom hive body as a brood chamber. The next higher up hive body is for honey storage for the hive. The supers on top of this second hive body are the honey supers. They contain the honey for the beekeeper's use. Beekeepers noticed a couple of things about this arrangement. First, they noticed that Queens don't like to lay eggs in the outside frames of the hive body. Using ten frames in the brood chamber means that the queen has eight frames to use for laying eggs. If you put 9 frames in the brood chamber the queen only has seven to use. So always put ten frames in the brood chamber. You'll get more brood, and a happier queen.
The queen is happier because queens "like" ten frame hives for egg laying. Ten frame hives honor bee space. Queens lay better in ten frame hives. And this brings up one of the reasons to use nine frame hives on honey supers. You don't want eggs in your honey supers. And because queens prefer ten frame hive bodies they tend to avoid nine frame hive bodies, even without a queen excluder. At least that's what the books say. And the experience of Houston beekeepers seems to bear it out.
But that's not the main reason beekeepers use nine frames on their honey supers. Beekeepers like nine frame honey supers because the bees draw the comb out a little more because of that extra space. Why does that matter? Because when extracting time comes around you have to cut the caps off the comb before putting the frames in the extractor. Most beekeepers use a heated knife for this job. And nine frame supers have longer comb, so it is easier to cut off the caps with that heated knife. Ten frame supers often have comb that is "below" the edge of the part of the frame upon which the knife glides, causing the beekeeper to have to use a honey scratcher to get the comb uncapped. A messy and slow job.
Beekeepers also believe that nine frame honey supers have more honey in them than ten frame supers would. A survey at a Houston Beekeepers meeting revealed that everyone present used nine frames in their honey supers. There was some discussion about whether the extra bit of wax cut off on nine frame supers slowed down the last honey crop of the year., There was no consensus on this issue. The argument is that it takes a "lot" of honey to make a pound of wax, and that nine frame supers require more building out, and thus more honey effort from the bees. Because it is unclear how many pounds of honey it takes the bees to produce a pound of wax, this question is unresolved. Bee literature estimates vary from six or seven pounds all the way up to twenty pounds of honey for one pound of wax. It is hard to calculate how much honey the bees are eating to make that pound of wax. But it's something to think about.
Although everyone at the meeting used nine frames on their honey supers, they were also of the opinion that beekeepers should use ten frames on the honey supers the first year they are drawn out. This makes a stronger, more uniform comb in the first year. The next year you can go to nine frames without danger. If you start with nine frames the comb is sometimes so weak that the extraction process itself will deform the comb. Not a good thing. Stick with ten frames the first year. Then you can go to nine frames--only on the honey supers--after the first year. Happy beekeeping.
Donald Burger, Program Chairman
Houston Beekeepers Association
January, 2003