Amount of frames in national hive

[Beefriendly]

But no harm done. It's an interesting topic. I remember reading something of Huber before, so will delve into that a bit more now. Thanks for the reference.

Cheers.

It's different depending on the usage of the bees and can be 2 different sizes depending on circumstances. The "bee space" between faces of combs allows 2 bees to work back to back. The "beespace" between the edge of a frame and the side of the box allows passage of bees but is not large enough for them to decide to fill this gap with brace comb/propolise etc. This is the "bee space" that is left between the edges of the comb and the hive on top bar hives.
This is probably where a lot of the confusion arises.

 

[drex]

I did say, that since this was in the beginners section I was keeping it simple. The most crucial bee space for beginners to understand is that where bees need to work back to back (8-9 mm). Obviously where bees only go singly, for example between frame side bar and box then only the 4.5 MM. is needed

 

[Beefriendly]

There was a moveable comb hive in use in Scotland pre Langstroth, and no doubt other places had the same sort of thing. The Scottish one was called the Stewarton and there is a rather good story regarding it.

PH

Lots of beekeepers in those days had moveable comb hives based on slats, very similar to top bar hives. The slats were even used in some skeps when the idea caught on. We pinched the idea from the Greeks who had been using it for a few thousand years. It was moveable frame hives that took beekeeping to the next level hence Langstroth. Although I'm sure several keepers probably cottoned on to this around the same time, but Langstroth was the first to patent his idea and put it down in writing.
The Stewarton was an attempt at trying to prevent the queen laying in the upper supers....which they did by having the slats that the bees built their comb on spaced further apart in the upper boxes. The idea, was that the comb would be drawn much deeper than brood box comb and so the queen wouldn't lay there. But I've never heard whether it was successful or not. Also had an ingenuous system of doors for controlling bee access.