Advice needed: Bees take honey OUT from honey super

Do you need 2 brood boxes for winter there? Or only 1?
If you need 2, do you want to make sure they are full coming into winter? Or are you more interested in getting honey now?

What do all the other beekeepers do in your area? 1 or 2 brood boxes?

The beekeepers here work on a minimum of two brood boxes for a full hive, single brood boxes only for offsprings. I however want honey!

Quite the predicament I would say… Maybe @AngoraAngy can let you know when she got a Flow in her Flow Super…
to be patient or not to be…
to have your hive prepared for winter in Germany or not… hmmmm…

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It would be simplest to be patient, especially with your recommended local practices. However, if you feel compelled to do something, one possibility would be this:

  1. Cut a section out of your inner cover, or a shim, to create an upper entrance.
  2. Remove the brood box with the least brood in it, making sure that the queen is not in that box. Put the queen excluder on top of the remaining box.
  3. Put the Flow super on top of the queen excluder.
  4. Put the second brood box on top of the Flow super.

This will allow the brood to emerge above the queen excluder, and if there are drones, they can use the upper entrance to exit the hive (they can’t go through the queen excluder). Also, any honey in the brood box will be moved down by the bees - they don’t like stores away from the active brood nest.

I really would not recommend doing this though. In Germany, May is prime nectar flow, and a little patience would be a lot better for the bees. You probably have quite cold winters with frost and the bees will need 2 deeps for winter stores, unless you are willing to feed them diligently. I don’t like feeding, as I think honey is better for bees than man-made feed.

Your bees, and your choice, but I would just push some burr comb into the plastic frames to make them smell of the hive, and wait for a couple more weeks. :blush:

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Hi Dawn, wouldn’t there be the risk of supercedure queens being made in this top box with the distance (full langstroth size box) between the upper brood and the queen? I suppose you could just remove them (the queen cells) if they are made…

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Absolutely, but I would say the risk is less than 30% (top of my head, not researched :wink: ). As I said, I really wouldn’t do this, but if you want to force the bees to use the Flow super, that is the risk.

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I see one of your brood frames has empty cells on the top corners. What are the other frames like? What are the brood frames in the bottom super like?

There must be a temporary honey dearth at the moment for the bees to have cleaned up that single frame in the flow super as well as empty out some honey from the top corners. The bees will never put honey in an extra super during a honey dearth. They may not even replace what honey they are consuming until a honey flow starts.

Don’t expect the bees to store extra honey until such times as they have replaced what they have depleted.

I agree with @Dawn_SD, have patience in this instance, seeing as you have honey & brood in the same frames & want to add a flow super as well. A honey flow may just be around the corner. Local knowledge would be helpful in that area.

It’s a shame that you only have one hive. It’s hard to judge the performance of one hive unless you have other hives to compare it to. Some colonies will just coast along while at the same time other colonies will really power on. This was discussed on the forum recently. Not all queens being equal.

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Hello @wykradt,
If you are really excited to get some honey (and don’t want to mess around too much with your set up) you could replace one of the Flow frames with an empty deep and let the bees draw out a frame of cut-comb honey for you.

We found, by using the Flow hybrid, that the bees will avoid filling the Flow frames if they have the opportunity to draw their own comb. We harvested incredibly luscious honey from our hybrid naturally drawn deeps last season. Still enjoying it too :honey_pot:

Hi Tracey, he/she had a traditional frame in the flow super. The bees started to fill it, then emptied it.

@wykradt, one possibility for that frame getting emptied out if there in no honey dearth is that your colony could have swarmed. Just a fleeting thought.

Hello Jeff,
Our bees did that too with the Flow frames, but they did not touch their capped naturally drawn deeps. I was just thinking with one cut comb frame, you would have quite a bit os honey to enjoy while being patient for next season.

One way to get the bees up into the flow super real quick is to take a broodframe with brood up. The nurse bees will follow and once the brood has emerged, they will fill that frame with honey and commence working on the flow frames.
I still see too much space for the bees to fill in your broodbox frames. Unless you temporarily reduce to one broodbox somehow, I can’t see you are doing your bees a favor forcing them into empty space with their low numbers. They are doing their best and you should feel good to see such healthy brood frames.
You could check if you have a fully capped honey frame in your broodbox and take that for now. But that would set back the flow super action even more.
The good thing is, once your flow frames are all sealed, your bees will be able to quickly fill the frames in a good flow.

Also consider the weather. On rainy or windy days the bees start consuming their honey.

Exactly right. I have 5 colonys here and have only had Flow successes from 2 of them. Both of these refilled the Fframes twice this season whereas the others barely touches the Fframes, one not even filling out the cells.

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Thanks for all the advice. True, I have one hive, but my mentor has several next to it, all classical, all German National. We‘ll check later today and report. Putting one brood box above the honey super seems a bit brutal to me, but I‘ll fiscuss this with my mentor as well. We‘ll check all frames and I will make photos.
Interesting what you say about the weather: it has indeed been cold and wet for the last ten days or so, so a dearth seems a likely thing. Expect more info later today/tomorrow, am now busy looking after my roe deer and wild boar.
Please know how immensely grateful I am for all your great help and advice!
All the best
Bertram

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Hi Tracey, I agree, however these bees are delving into the naturally drawn deeps. Bertram just posted that the last 10 days has been wet & cold. That would make the bees delve into stored honey.

There is all of summer ahead of Bertram for the bees to cash in on any potential honey flow.

@wykradt Bertram, you are most welcome. I look forward to the update & photos.

Hello Jeff,
Yes, and yes :hugs:

Too soon to give up on the Bees using the Flow, if it is anything like Seattle, we are just getting going.

So good luck Betram, it’s great that you have an experienced mentor to work with too.

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You can get supercedure cells if you put brood above the honeyflow. I did this to help draw bees up and they made a queen cell being so far from the queen. However, you just need to check the top box for a week or so until all brood is capped so not hard as long as you are around that week to check.

Putting brood above does increase the traffic in the honeyflow frames but they still will not use them until there is surplus honey. Once they do, they go right to it. Every hive of bees act different though in my case. Like someone else said, probably has more to do with how productive a given hive is more than if they like the frames or not.

Joe

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Update:
Had a good look at the bees today with Johannes, my mentor (runs 120 hives, is an official pollinator in our area, so knows a thing or maybe two).
The hive is doing nicely, lots of bees, lots of brood. Quite some honey as well in the brood box.

Queenie is also busy doing what She’s supposed to do:

We discussed several options accoding to the advice you all gave me:
A) More patience. Always a good thing, or so I am told.
B) Hive is strong, reducing it to one brood box would be a shame, according to my mentor.
C) Honey super stays on top - for time being. If push comes to shove, we’ll sandwich it.
D) Johannes advised me not to coat the flowframes with melted bee wax yet. We did however smear some old wax mixed with propolis on all the flow frames to give the bees a bit of a home feeling. Additionally we hung one frame that was bristling with capped honey up into the honey super (looked pretty much like pic Nr 3).

There is indeed a honey dearth at the moment, just as @JeffH thought. My mentor, who has some ten hives standing next to mine has had honey from only one of them, other beekeepers in the area report the same. We had temperatures around and below 15° Celsius, lots of rain as well. Red clover not yet in full bloom bloom and yielding very little, almost no bees on it. Sweet chestnut, lime trees, acacia also not yet in bloom. So, there is simply no flow.

Now it is wait and see again. I will keep you posted. Saturday I will be going to England for the week, so probalby some new pcs before, certainly after. They SHOULD have begun to coat the flowframes by then…

Best
Bertram

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Thank you for the update. It sounds like you have an excellent mentor. I like his advice very much. :blush:

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As you can see from the post that @Faroe added to this conversation I highly recommend it. I have melted some of the beeswax I have scraped off from my hives and then used a paintbrush to coat the frames with. I will do the same with my new set of frames I just received as well. In my opinion it made the difference but as you probably already know the bees are going to do what they want to when they are ready.

@Bobby_Thanepohn has done some great videos on waxing the frames. Good Luck!

I have seen the video. Since I am a complete novice to beekeeping, however, I rely on what my mentor decides is best. He advised not to prush the wax on, but rub in wax and propolis. We will see whether that does the trick, or whether we will in a secopnd step coat them with melted wax.

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