>I understand that an 8-frame super will be lighter than a 10 when full of honey or brood. But how often do you wind up removing a full hive body of honey vs. brood.
A couple of times a year with a couple of hives. How often do you want to mess up your back?
> It seems that you'd be more often going into the brood bodies to check the queen and brood patterns, etc.
Which often have a 90 pound deep of honey on top of them.
>With honey, if you want to avoid lifting the whole super,can't you just remove the frames and replace with others, leaving the boxes in place.
Of course. But you get a lot more bees in the air and spend a lot more time moving a frame at a time. The BIGGER advantage though is to have the SAME SIZE FRAMES in the brood boxes so you can bait them up into the supers and you can pull frames of honey to feed etc.
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslazy.htm#uniformframesize>So with a greater number of 8-frame brood bodies aren't you going to wind up lifting more of them even though they are lighter?
I don't care how many boxes I lift that don't hurt me. I care how many boxes I lift that DO hurt me.
> You'd be more often lifting the 2-3 top 8 frame medium brood supers rather than the one top 10-frame brood super.
You get to move 48 pound boxes instead of 90 pound boxes. This is ALWAYS an improvement. If they are empty you can take them two at a time.
>So, I guess I'm asking if it really makes much difference in the lifting work and if so how?
http://www.bushfarms.com/beeslazy.htm#lighterboxesBasically it's 90 pounds vs 48 pounds.