Frame (beehive)

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Frame (beehive)

A frame in a beehive

Beehive (beekeeping)

A beehive is an enclosed structure in which some honey bee species of the genus Apis live and raise their young. Natural beehives are naturally-occurring structures occupied by honey bee colonies, while domesticated honey bees live in man-made beehives, often in an apiary....
is the structural element that holds the honeycomb

Honeycomb

A honeycomb is a mass of hexagonal waxcells built by honey bees in their beehive to contain their larva and stores of honey and pollen.beekeeping may remove the entire honeycomb to harvest honey....
or brood comb

Brood comb

The brood comb is the beeswax structure of cells where the queen bee lays eggs. It is the part of the beehive where new brood is raised by the colony....
within the hive body (or "super"). The frame is a key part of the modern "movable" hive since it can be removed in order to inspect the bees for disease or to extract the excess honey.

One of first beehive frames was devised by Petro Prokopovych

Petro Prokopovych

Petro Prokopovych was the founder of commercial beekeeping. He introduced a number of novelties in traditional beekeeping that allowed significant progress in the practice....
in 1814.

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Encyclopedia

A frame in a beehive

Beehive (beekeeping)

Honeycomb

Brood comb

Petro Prokopovych

Petro Prokopovych was the founder of commercial beekeeping. He introduced a number of novelties in traditional beekeeping that allowed significant progress in the practice....
in 1814. However the distance between frames was too big and the frame lay on supporting strips of wood. As the result, the frames were cross-attached by burr comb and propolized to the supporting strips and were difficult to remove. In Prokopovych's design, the frames were placed only in honey chamber. In brood chamber, the bees built the combs in free style.

Jan Dzierzon

Jan Dzierzon

Jan Dzierzon sometimes Germanised into Johann Dzierzon...
described the correct distance between combs in the brood chamber as 1½ inches from the center of one bar to the center of the next. In 1848, Dzierzon introduced grooves into the hive’s side walls replacing the strips of wood for hang top bars. The grooves were 8 mm apart and met the requirements for bee space.

August von Berlepsch (May 1852) in Thuringia and L. L. Langstroth (October 1852) in the United States also designed movable frame hives. Today, the Langstroth hive

Langstroth hive

The Langstroth bee hive is the standard beehive used in many parts of the world for bee keeping. The advantage of the Langstroth hive over hives previous to its invention on October 30, 1851, is that the bees build honeycomb into frames, which can be moved with little trouble because the frames are designed so that the bees do not build w...
is the most common design. A Langstroth hive is designed to hold ten frames spaced 1 1/2 inches (38 mm) center to center (but may have as few as 8 frames if the comb can be drawn out more widely within the frame to maintain the beespace). The top bar length is 19 inches (48.3 cm). The depth of the frame varies. Frames are made from wood or plastic.

Specialty frames such as cell bar frames are used to raise new queens

Queen bee

The term queen bee is typically used to refer to an adult, mated female that lives in a honey bee colony or hive; she is usually the mother of all the bees in the hive....
.

Source

The hive and the honeybee, Dadant, 1971.