The outside frames on a 10 frame hive typically are difficult to fill out.
This follows from looking at a wild bee nest. The outside combs are
smaller than the inside combs due to the "round" nature of the nest. Hence, I
would bet that the inside combs are about the size of an 8 frame hive with
each outside frames of a 10 frame hive being the smaller outside combs of
a wild nest. A wild nest varies in size so some probably do not utilize
the outside frames of a 10 frame hive. I believe Langstroth knew this and
made his hive 10 frames with each outside frame for the variance of the wild
nest size.
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