UTAH FLOW keepers

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21

I have supers and brood boxes. No bought the complete flow hive.

22

Hi, are you looking to buy your bees locally? Any good recommendations?

23

Hi everyone!!! How is everyone doing with their Flow Hive??? I am buying a Barn Hive locally too, its pretty neat learning about all this. I am trying to find the best deal for Bee Kee

24

I bought a 3 pound package of bees for my Flow Hive. I read it’s a good idea to have 2 hives, in case you have to help a struggling hive you have bees available. I decided to also buy a Barn Hive with a NUC. I will be picking up the package this Saturday, April 9 and the NUC may 13. I bought them from a local company in Provo.

http://thehoneycompany.com

25

All - Two questions. Trying to determine if I need to feed my new bees (getting them on May 7th) and if so, what feeder will work best for Flow Hive?

Also, thinking ahead, how many of frames should I leave for the bees come winter? Do you just leave the brood box or the upper frames of honey?

26

Are you doing a double brood box in year 1? Or juse the 1 and then the super on top?

27

If you want to have a decent chance of overwintering your bees, you need a second brood box in Utah, guaranteed. :wink: Don’t super your bees until that second box is full.

28

I’m doing 2 brood boxes before I do the honey super too.

I am picking up my NUC bees tonight. Woo woo. :honeybee:

29

I’m adding a second brood box today. Did you just throw one on top or did you stagger empty frames and drawn frames? What worked for you? I’m in Springville and the first box is pushing 90% full and I don’t want them to swarm!

30

I added my second brood boxes on 2 hives underneath the existing boxes this year. It worked very well, and I will probably always do it this way now. I did not move any frames from one box to the other. The benefits of adding a new box below are:

  1. Maintenance of brood warmth in the existing box (heat rises and bees try hard to keep the brood temp stable at 35C)
  2. Bees naturally like to build downwards. If they can’t do that, they like to maintain an “expanding edge” of comb. If your new empty frames are below, you will get much stronger, more orderly comb. If they are above, and you have foundationless frames, you may end up with some very creative comb which is wasteful of bee effort and undesirably messy.

I am not the first, nor the only person to add new brood boxes below the first one. In fact, Warre hives have done it this way for a long time, very successfully. The only disadvantage that I have found is that you have to lift a heavy brood box to put the new one underneath. My bees seem to like it, and I do too! :blush:

31

Thanks For the response. I did as you suggested and added a box on bottom 2 days ago. They seem to be taking to it. When I checked today there was quite a big bunch of them working on a couple frames when I just cracked it today. Questions this has brought up

  1. Now the entry/exit is all the way at the bottom and a whole empty deep box away. Is that ok? When I checked it tonight I didn’t see one bee enter or exit. It was dark out already and a little chilly so not completely unexplainable…

  2. Side question, the new box holds 9 frames as does the original flow give brood box. They only send 8. Even when I centered those ones, the bees still built a bunch of wild burr comb on the side wall in the space between the wall and the last frame. So I switched to 9 per box. Is that ok?

Thanks for the help…

32

Yes, it is fine. Bees don’t fly in the dark unless forced to.

In my opinion, it is not OK, unless you have modified all of the frames by shaving the shoulders down. The major problems with 9 frames are as follows:

  1. You have now messed up the bee space on the outer face of the outer frames. When the bees draw comb next to the wall, they will not have the correct space to navigate between the comb and the wall.
  2. You do not have any space for lifting the first frame out without rolling bees. This will result in killing a lot more bees when you take that first frame out.

If you are worried about crazy comb, I would suggest putting in a follower board until the outer frame comb is drawn. I use these and they work pretty well:
http://www.mannlakeltd.com/beekeeping-supplies/product/WW-155.html

Hope that helps!

33

Park City newbee here. Just received a Flow Hive for Mothers day. Way excited to get started!

1 Like
34

Welcome! I love Park City. We ski there every year. The snow was awesome this February. Hope you find some bees, but then, Utah is the beehive state, so you shouldn’t have trouble! :blush:

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35

Richmond Utah Newbee here. Put on sencond brood box today. Foundationless and all is well. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
36

Richmond Utah here, How’s it going up there in Park City with your new flow hive? I just put my flow hive super on yesterday and am quite excited.

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37

Nice paint job and decorative art…and very excellent barn too.

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38

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`Hey so my bees have sealed the joints between the slats in the flow frames but can’t seem to figure out how to draw the comb out. Any suggestions or ideas? Are the slats inside the flow frame supposed to be not lined up exactly? See pics.

39

I am afraid you have run out of time. The Flow frames need to go on at the start of Spring, and come off in mid to late summer.

Here is a thread which tells you how to get the bees to use them:

1 Like
40

Hey there Farmington, if you are still checking in on this, I’m a new flow hiver in SLC (got the Flow Hive 2, coming in August) and would love to hear your experience so far with how the Flow has been working in our climate with our shortened (compared to Australia) honey flows.
Thanks so much!