Comparison of Frame types and Bee Housing

This page will include an comparison of the frame types added by various Forestry addons and the various housing types available for bees.

Bee Houses vs Apiaries vs Alvearies
Stub answer:

Bee Houses cannot be automated, cannot take frames, cannot mutate, and can only produce outputs from bees. This includes the flowers, if applicable.

Apiaries are single-block improved bee houses, that can be automated, can mutate, but have drastically reduced production. They have three frame slots; when all three are filled with forestry frames, they are almost but not quite 100% production.

Alvearies are large multblocks that start at 100% production, can be automated, and can have altered environments. With add-ons, they can take frames as well.

Frames
With Forestry, frames can only be used in Apiaries to improve the production rate of the bees.

Extra Bees added a block for the Alveary, so that frames are also usable there. It also added several frames with additional modifiers.

Magic Bees also added new frames, which don't tax the local aura anymore (as they did before 2.0.0).

Frames modify one or more of: All these values are multiplicative.
 * Production Chance
 * Mutation Chance
 * Lifetime
 * Territory

Some frames have a maximum effect achievable with stacking that type of frame.

If your frames change the mutation rate to more than 1000%, the princess/queen may degenerate to a swarmer bee. The same is true if you overwork her by boosting production rate to more than 1600%. Swarmer bees are marked with a [-] behind their name and will die off at some random time in the future.