HoneyPump, What is the purpose or objective of your interest in 8 Frame experimentation? From my understanding, most choose to go with 8 frames because of hive weight concerns. Is there a different reason for you? With your equipment, weight should not be of concern? Nor should hive heights though your 8 frame boxes will now be 7-9 boxes high.
Phillip
Difficult to fully put into text. My interest is in assessing overall beehive performance through a 2 year cycle. Overall means ALL indices of performance and how the effects of those cascade through the management of the business. Am approaching this as a matter of beehive performance and critter preference, not as subjective human personal choice or preference. I have my bias to 10F, but am open minded and thinking about trying some. I am short but stalky and burly furry guy, I do not care about box size or weight - that pro-con is not in the mix of indices.
So, basically I am looking for simple and practical suggestions of what has been done successfully for managing 8 frames of bees in hi-stacks of 10 frame boxes. Has to be cheap, has to be easy, has to work. I have other inputs. Just figured I would check in here on what experiences there are in the BM group, and would be an interesting thread for the group.
I do not feel am reinventing or re-experimenting anything. Am taking a focused look at it wrt my particular operation and style, and this could be an interesting discussion here on BM.
PS: the scope is less that a hundred boxes for the trial period. Depending on what the results are, the impact would be on thousands of boxes.