​I hope it is ok if I write my ideas about one-box overwintering instead of
giving some references. If not, please ignore my message.​

First, I am not sure if my ideas are appropriate for the conditions in your
area (bee race, climate...) and your ideas and the way of managing bees as
well.

I think here in Serbia (South-East Europe), overwintering in one deep box
can be considered almost equally with two boxes variant. Our Carnica bees
develop strong colonies in late Spring and early Summer, but in Winter, the
size of colonies reduces to one and a half or one box or even smaller.
Also, they are very frugal with their winter stores and our main pasture is
very early (first part of May).

So, one idea I could suggest you to think about is to reduce the hive to
one box and put an empty box bellow. Also, in that case I would suggest to
have upper round entrance on the box with frames. Lower entrance can be
significantly reduced or even closed later in Autumn.
BUT, if the conditions in your area are such that together with strong
colonies in the moment of box-reducing there is some significant nectar
flow, bees could build some wax bellow the frames, in empty space. If it is
a problem, you could forget the idea of an empty box bellow. That could
happen as a result of sugar feeding as well.
(in fact, there is also an idea to have a 2-3 inches shallow frame (box)
bellow the deep box with some thin bars on its upper side to provide air
space prevent comb building) but that makes things a bit more complicated.

What kind of frames should be in that one box? First, put in the box: the
frames with honey and a lot of pollen and frames with brood in the middle.
Simple, of course, but what if we have more frames with brood or more good
frames with honey/pollen?

One possibility is to do the management in two phases. In the first phase
have the colony in two boxes until the size of colony (number of bees)
reduces to one box. Before, you can compose the hive and especially the
upper box where you want your bees to winter in a way I described above. In
the box bellow you can put frames with small quantity of honey, or frames
with brood that are without arches of honey. In the same time, you could
have not more than 4-5 frames with brood in the upper box, or 6, only as
one exception.

When young bees develop from the brood comb in lower box, we don't expect
the queen to lay eggs there more (she should be in the upper box). So, we
can remove those frames in that time, together with other frames in the
lower box.

Where we could store those frames depends on what is there on the frames
and the beekeeper's conditions and his way of beekeeping as well. One idea,
maybe more suitable for smaller beekeepers is to put a plastic foil on that
former upper box, with some space that bees can go through above, and to
put the former lower box on the plastic foil and that box with bees.
Through that small space in the foil, bees can go and carry the rest of the
honey to the lower (the main) box. later in the season you can remove that
temporary upper box and plastic foil as well.

What else you could do with the surplus of the frames is to put those in
some other hives, of course, if you consider that safe for bees health.

At the end I would say something that maybe should be said on the
beginning, that the idea of one-box wintering is more suitable if we keep
bees with queen excluder on the first box during the season. If not, maybe
the idea of two boxes wintering could be better, especially because if we
don't know what to do with surplus of frames.

With hope it can be useful, kind regards
Predrag

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