A quick look around the Home Apiary - all good!

Описание: It's here in our home apiary that my wife and I carry out our queen breeding and rearing and where we have our nucs. After producing as many queen cells as we need from our chosen Welsh Black breeder queens we place one sealed queen cell into either -

a standard five frame nuc -

a so called 'queen castle' which is basically a brood box divided into three chambers (each with its own entrance). If all three virgins mate successfully we can move the outer two into their own nucs and, later, on to hives while the third can remain there or move on as needed. If only two mate we can change the division into two chambers - very flexible - they can also be 'restocked' with sealed queen cells immediately to begin the process again.

or a 'quadratic' hive. The quadratic is exactly one quarter of the floorpan of a standard National so four can be placed on a brood box to allow the bees to draw out comb and even for the queen to lay up with eggs.

Added to that, two quadratics fit exactly over a standard nuc and, because my nucs are slightly non-standard (in that two fit exactly over a brood box) the home made frames from our quadratics fit neatly crosswise in the nuc so long as slim runners are attached to the inside lengthwise rather than crosswise as for a normal British National frame.
In this way we have three distinct sizes of boxes (we don't, at the moment, use shallow supers at all to avoid a fourth size) but all of the various sizes can be mixed and matched as we need them.
Phil Chandler has a very good description of this type of mini-mating hive on his channel but I first heard about them way back in about 1982 when they were extensively used by Brother Adam the famed (or infamous) head beekeeper at Buckfast Abbey. You can see Phil Chandler's excellent description of them by looking on YouTube for the following . . .

Phil Chandler - Barefoot Beekeeper
Introducing the Quadratic Hive (Part 1)

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Richard