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Thanks for digging that up, Peter.  

I bought equipment from a beekeeper who practised this system two decades ago, so it has been around a long time.

One thing I notice is that two brood boxes are used in this project for each queen.  This is unnecessary and even undesirable in some cases, since the lower frames are inaccessible and there is too enough space under the excluder to discourage bees going up well in many situations.  The main advantage is that there should be enough stores to winter without adding a box in fall, forestalling potential starvation for those beekeepers who are not too attentive.

One standard brood box easily accommodates all the brood from even the most prolific queen, especially if cells under 5.3mm are used and even more so with the smaller cells which are becoming popular. Having the excluder immediately above the brood and little storage space below encourages activity in the supers.

However, one box per queen does not leave much room for reserve feed if flows do not materialise or end suddenly, so beekeepers need to be on their toes if they pull all the honey at end of season and don't immediately add a second box and feed (preferably under).  In such cases, sometimes emergency feeding may be required while supers are on and that leads to a quandary.

FWIW, Babe and Charlie Warren of Babe's honey on Vancouver Island ran pallets with -- as I recall -- eight brood boxes sharing all the supers stacked evenly on top of all hives to form a cubic shape.  There was a "manifold" above the excluder that allowed the bees to wander freely thoughout all supers.  The obvious advantage was that if one queen was poor or failed, then the associated bees were not unemployed.

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