Combs are drawn best closely spaced. Personally I like drawing combs with 11 shaved to fit in a ten frame box. After you have the resultant fully drawn straight combs, it is faster to handle and extract fewer frames that weigh more per each. I routinely run 8 frames in a ten frame extracting super. You lose nothing in honey volume and spend less time extracting.
Exactly... the "SPACE" in the hive doesnt change.. YES, you are minus one frame, but the SPACE is still the same. The bees draw the comb out further to fill that space and maintain their "bee" space between the frames... So in effect, you lose the space nce filled by foundation, cappings etc from one of the frames gaining a wee bit...
I looked into it a lot, and it is a fact that you "can" get more honey minus one frame... but as moots was saying.. is it worth the trouble for the 1/8th of a pound of honey you get extra?... The true advantage I have seen, is in ease of handling and uncapping.. One less frame to uncap and extract. The comb is wider, making it VERY easy to uncap... so... were back to methodology and convenience... if its worth the spacing brackets or spacing tool, and the time to use/install them to you, then it WORKS for you!!!!
From all I have read and seen.. the best method is to run 11 frames in the brood boxes and 9 in the supers... maybe one day I will get around to trying that... For now, ten frames in ten frame boxes is working well as MY method :shock: