The honest trade-offs

All chapters

A colony that rebuilds its comb every harvest, with nowhere to bank a season's worth of drawn frames, brings home less: something like 10 to 25 kg a year in a north-west European climate, well under what the same colony would store in a National or a Langstroth built to keep and reuse its comb.
Inspections cost more per look, not less: lifting a whole box apart, or freeing a comb glued only to the bar above it, disturbs a colony more than sliding a frame out of its runners.
And watching for varroa is harder without a frame to shake bees from for a proper mite count, so a keeper here leans more on a mite board and the entrance.