A lot depends on where you are beekeeping and what strain of bees you intend to keep in the hive. You can spend a lot of time studying which hive and which bee is best for a given set of conditions. The bees don't care, they will happily make a home in just about any cavity from 20 liters to 300 liters in size. It is up to the beekeeper to determine what is best for management purposes. There are 4 hive designs that bear looking at.
The Perone hive is a fixed comb hive that is excellent for low input conditions. It is primarily used in 3rd world agriculture.
Top bar hives such as Kenya or Tanzania top bar are very low cost to build but have relatively high profit potential. They are increasingly used by backyard beekeepers for their low input characteristics.
Horizontal hives are excellent for tropical agriculture. Layens and Jackson Horizontal Hive are two examples worth looking at. JHH in particular has been adapted and has significant advantages over most other hive designs.
The Rose hive would be a major contender. It has significant advantages over most other vertical stackable hive designs. I would not use Rose hives because I can see their inherent design flaws. Each box contains 12 frames with nominal comb space of 105 square inches per comb and requires 24 frames (in 2 boxes) for nominal wintering hive configuration. He got a huge amount of the design right, especially as compared with Langstroth hives. He missed that a single large brood chamber is more cost efficient and more efficient for queen laying than using multiple boxes. He also missed that there are a minimum of 24 frames to inspect to find a queen or otherwise go through a colony. By comparison, I am using square deep Dadant hives with 14 frames which gives nominal capacity almost identical to 2 Rose boxes but is more efficient for queen laying because there are fewer corners in the frames and there are only 14 frames to inspect for the queen. It is very important to me that the brood nest be easy to inspect as I intend to produce queens! If not for the desire to produce queens, I could easily have chosen the Rose hive design.
Square Modified Dadant was Brother Adam's choice and with a lot of good reasons. I am in the process of converting all my hives to these and already can tell how much better they are than Langstroths. I will post the reasons for using these below. One of my primary reasons is so I can run a 2 queen colony in a single box.
Keep in mind that an extractor will be needed to handle whatever size frame is chosen. Also note that I am building all of my own frames because I prefer 1.25 inch end bars. This allows me to put 14 frames in a single Square Deep box. I do not advise using 1.25 inch end bars unless you are prepared to deal with the differences in bee behavior.
1. There are max 14 frames to examine to find a queen, inspect, etc.
2. All of the brood a prolific queen can produce will fit in one brood box
3. It has enough room for wintering in one box, a Langstroth is not quite enough
4. It is designed to run a horizontal 2 queen system using a divider
5. It reduces crowding effects so the bees are less likely to swarm
6. The wide entrance improves ventilation
7. The brood nest is more consolidated instead of being spread across multiple boxes of combs
8. My extractor was made to handle this size comb, the frames will fit my existing system if I need to extract
9. Easy to use to produce queens, just put a divider in place like a cloake board and have at it
10. It allows me to re-use the shallow extracting frames I already have, just add square supers.
11. It is highly efficient for space utilization
12. It costs less for a complete working hive than most other movable frame stackable super designs
13. It is much less likely to blow over in a strong wind
14. Square modified Dadant hives can easily be palletized
15. Can turn the supers 90 degrees so the bees fill them evenly and mature the honey all at one time.
16. Provides clustering space at night and in rainy weather
17. Diverts foragers from the broodnest directly into the supers
18. Can easily adjust the number of brood frames to fit the queen's ability to fill them with brood
and here are the detriments
1. A box full of honey will weigh a bit over 100 pounds, not good for the back
2. These are obviously not standard in the U.S. which is a detriment if I ever sell out
3. Equipment is not normally available in the U.S., I have to custom build the frames and other hive components
4. Splitting has to be done by moving frames instead of separating boxes.
