It's raining here in the south, so, back off topic
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If, as you suggest, you go over to just using national shallow boxes it would be relatively simple to add two boxes of straight combs above the 'curvy cross comb' early enough in the season. The queen will head to the top box before going down to the floor.
Two would be needed simply because one shallow on it's own doesn't have the depth to get the nest out of the cross comb box. I've used a similar idea with mating nucs, adding an empty box underneath them at the start of September, allowing them to build wild comb for brood rearing from the bottom bars of their frames while filling the mating nuc combs with feed, then in March/early April it's a simple task to go around and scrape all the wild comb off and return them to their correct single box configuration because they've always moved into the top box by that stage. I aquired the idea from an American who claims to use the method on full size langstroth colonies with good success.
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