>Do I want to search through 11 jumbo frames during spring inspections or do I want to search through 30 mediums and have bees everywhere huh
I can search 30 medium frames left to right with no circling back to be sure. Jumbo frames require at least three times over to catch the ones that snuck around my field of focus. It takes me three times longer to look through the same amount of bees with Jumbos compared to mediums. I ran deeps for 28 years or so. I have run jumbos off and on during that time as well. I've run mediums for the last 12 years or so. I would much rather find a queen on mediums. Also, at the end of a day of looking for queens in deeps, my wrists hurt. At the end of a day of looking for queens on mediums they don't.
>Why would I want to shuffle honey frames down into the brood box? I use them for honey. huh
For instance:
You can put brood up a box to "bait" the bees up. This is useful without an excluder (I don't use excluders) but it's especially useful if you really want to use an excluder. A couple of frames of brood above the excluder (leaving the queen and the rest of the brood below) really motivates the bees to cross the excluder and start working the next box above it.
You can put honey combs in for food wherever you need it. I like this for making sure nucs don't starve without the robbing that feeding often starts, or bulking up the stores of a light hive in the fall.
You can unclog a brood nest by moving pollen or honey up a box or even a few frames of brood up a box to make room in the brood nest to prevent swarming. If you don't have all the same size, where will you put these frames?
You can run an unlimited brood nest with no excluder and if there is brood anywhere you can move it anywhere else. You're not stuck with a bunch of brood in a medium that you can't move down to your deep brood chamber. The advantage of the unlimited brood nest is the queen isn't limited to one or two brood boxes, but can be laying in three or four. Probably not four deeps, but probably in four mediums.
>If I were to treat, do I want to be contaminating my food supply too (via shuffling of frames between brood and honey) huh
Yes, keep all those contaminated frames in the "no peeing section of the swimming pool". After all, bees never move anything. They don't move wax do they? Or honey? ;)
>Do I want more work or less work huh
Less, of course.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslazy.htm#uniformframesize>My nucs use medium frames and there’s nothing wrong with an all medium design, but it’s not exactly the cats meow either.
Actually, I think it is "the cat's meow".