Jim, you're right to raise this as an important factor. Different glues work in different ways and work best on different types of surfaces.
For anyone who's new to this - one good example - although strictly speaking not involving glue - is to take 2 sheets of clean glass and pour water onto one, and 'stick' them together. It will then be impossible to pull them apart, and the only way of separating those sheets of glass will be to slide them apart. So, water-thin glues (such as super-glue) will perform best when applied to smooth surfaces with minimal gap.
But, when gluing some smooth objects, it often pays to increase the surface area of the mating surfaces in order to maximise the area upon which the glue will be acting. This is commonly done by 'roughing-up' the surfaces with sandpaper, coarse wire brushes etc., which provides the surface with a 'key' - which provides more grip for the glue upon that surface as the result of the increased area of glue contact.
If you examine the end-grain of rough-sawn wood, especially that of light timber such as the white wood used for making beehive frames, you'll see the surface is extremely rough and thus has a much larger area for adhesion than (say) if it were to be sanded smooth. So it's best left like that if the intention is to use a relatively thick, gap-filling adhesive.
I've never used Gorilla Glue, so can't comment on it - I use a glue called 'D4': the name of which is a 'steal' from a EU classification for 100% waterproof glues. [D3 being a water-resistant glue when over-painted; D2 being a glue suitable only for interior use] I doubt it's available in the States, but worth buying if you should ever come across it. It's described as a 'Hybrid-Resin Adhesive', about as thick as thin custard (or single cream), has an initial set time of about 15 minutes, and is fully hardened within 24 hrs - can be much less - depends upon temperature. It's target market is the construction industry, and it's probably somewhere around 75% as strong as epoxy - certainly it's much stronger than the wood it adheres to.
I now use it for all beeekeeping woodware - it's ideal in particular for painting onto exposed end grain to weatherproof that wood. Brilliant stuff, and dirt cheap.
LJ