Hey so I have been experimenting a lot with bees lately, and I've found out that all bees except the bees that have a 1% speciality, are able to produce 1 comb every 27.5 seconds with 2-5 frames in the alveary. So the emerald comb for example has a 4% chance which means that to get it to always produce a comb every 27.5 seconds (100%), it's 4% x 1.7 (fastest trait multiplier) x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 = 108.8%, meaning it will always produce 1 comb every 27.5 seconds with 4 frames (each frame 200%). So that would mean to get a valuable bee to always make a comb you would need 6 frames. So I setup 5 alvearies with 2, 6, 9, 12 and 15 frames in them, and after 30 mins the 6, 9, 12 and 15 frame alvearies had the exact same amount of platinum and rocky combs (1:5 ratio, if it was 100% it would be a 1:2 ratio), and the one with 2 frames was only a few behind. It doesn't seem like frames really work well with the valuable bees for some reason, but for other people on forums they seem to be able to always get a comb with 6-9 frames, but that might be for a newer version of extra bees.
WARNING: A frame multiplier of 1600% or more total will cause the bee to gain a [-] trait after 4 gens on average. (If it was implemented in the current version.)
Oh hehe, I've run 100 alvearies with 6 frames for ages and never lost a bee on this version. But it seems like there is a math problem with extra bees that they fixed on the 1.6 pre release.