Equalizing or Strengthing for greater honey yeald.

[RHBee]

Would it be a best practice to pull a nuc from your smaller hives and use the left over bees to make much larger colonies to increase the honey harvest? I'm considering making a number of 4 frame medium nucs and reducing my number of large hives. Does this work?

[10framer]

seems reasonable to me. 

[Steel Tiger]

The Sustainable Apiary by Mike Palmer

[DMLinton]

Your idea is similar to some methods Mel Disselkoen has developed and published articles on.  See mdasplitter dot com (I am too new to post live links) - articles on splits and nuc management for increases and On the Spot Queen Rearing (OTS) are in PDF.

As a newbie, I found some of the articles a bit confusing as Mel refers to nucs when I think he is talking about 8 frame boxes.  Probably a matter of semantics as splits do start out as nucleus colonies and are grown into full size colonies.  Extra queens are removed and the "nucs" are all combined into one very large colony in time for the main nectar flow.

Bottom line is that yes, your idea should work.  The larger a colony, the more "extra hands" there are.  These extra hands busy themselves with making extra honey.  Mel says that one can up to double honey production by building these large colonies.

[Vance G]

At the beginning of modern removable frame beekeeping, one of the giants in the field would set up what he called support hives and loaded up production colonies to make large amounts of section comb honey.  Mel Disselkoen indeed recaps that on his wonderful site. 

[Wolfer]

I believe what your referring to is a cut down split. Pull your queen and a few frames of mixed brood and honey and start a new hive. Combine the rest with another hive. This gives that hive lots of workers until they start dying off.
At the end of the flow you can give some brood back to the queen in the nuc if she needs it.

This works best at the start of the flow.

By fall your back where you started with same amount of hives.