An incredibly hot hive led to Wilma & I helping a lady deal with her Flow hive, and angry bees. I remembered @Michael_Bush saying “divide & conquer”. We finished up dividing the hive 4 ways, with the owners help, before the owner bringing everything to my main apiary. I placed it all a fair way from my hives.
The Flow super was one split with one Flow frame missing, a result of it being easier to remove it rather than trying to put it back in again with so many angry bees. After receiving it, I put a frame of brood in the gap, for them to make a new queen with.
The lady wants to sell her Flow hive, so I decided to remove all the remaining Flow frames (with much difficulty, (angry bees)), which held a fair bit of honey.
I decided to harvest the honey, using my own flow super, tubes & keys. The outside of the frames looked pretty good, even impressive.
The channels smelt good after removing the caps, then to our surprise, a hive beetle flowed out of one of the tubes, followed by another one, then another, they kept coming with small grubs, until 22 beetles eventually flowed out.
Just an update on this topic. While removing the bottom board & legs off my truck in order to store it somewhere for the owners, I noticed a dark area through the gaps in the floor. Then I remembered the bottom tray, which I quickly removed. Wilma has some more photos to share:
The larvae are Black Soldier Fly larvae, the biggest, plumpest BSFL I have ever seen.
The sticky gooey fermenting mess must be a result of honey spills during previous harvests. Wilma said “those poor bees having to put up with that horrible smell”. Then we wondered if the smell was what drove the bees wild. These were the crankiest bees we’ve experienced in over 35 years of keeping bees.
The bees were fine until a few weeks ago, which was shortly after their last honey harvest.
Apart from all this, I’ve been suggesting to Flow users to check & clean the tray once a fortnight. Sadly this is an area that sometimes gets neglected.
Hi Eva, it certainly IS a good argument for solid floors.
Incidentally, I don’t think that the smell made the bees angry, as I wondered in my last post. Six days after removing bees away from the smell, they’re still extremely angry, as I found out while transferring about 4 frames of bees out of the Flow super yesterday.
Hi Paul, I think in this case it was not knowing to check the tray. The lady doesn’t have bees now. She sold her Flow hive to a customer of mine.
We have seen the odd messy tray on this forum. I suggest that they should be checked once a fortnight. I like and use solid floors. So therefore I don’t have that problem.
