Almost ready to Harvest my rooftop hive in Los Angeles

You could get 4 or 5 follower boards to fill the space. :blush:

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I didn’t know there was such a thing. Looks like what I need!!! Thanks Dawn. What is that…just a 5/8" piece of plywood with the top rail? My husband could make those!!

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Thats what I have done as well, three flows with one standard frame each side in an 8 frame box on top of two brood boxes. I have another hive next to it with 2 brood and one 6 frame flow. It has performed so much better than the hybrid, both coming out of winter in the same state. My plan was to leave the brood boxes alone and just harvest the flow frames, but they are not closing the flows even at 18% moisture, so have had to harvest standard frames to give them room as the flow is amazing at present. So my question is do the foragers stop bringing nectar if all combs are full? Is it better to put another flow on tp while waiting for them to cap, or harvest the standard frames in the brood boxes.

Thanks

Where are you Geoff…northern or southern hemisphere?

Not usually, they just prepare to swarm instead. :hushed:

You could do either, but what I do is put a traditional super (medium in the US, WSP or Ideal in Australia) on top of the Flow super. The extra space helps to reduce humidity, encourage capping and prevent swarming urges… :blush:

Southern hemisphere. Two of our much sort after nector producers yellow box and red gum (Eucallyptus melliodora and E. blakelyi) are really rocketing at the moment. Thanks Dawn, that certainly answers the question!
Action stations!

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I should have added a third option being to harvest the flows ( or some of them) at 18 % on the refractometer? The standard frames were on 16% at harvest. Cheers.

You could try that cautiously. Some people have found that uncapped honey leaks a lot into the hive. I have done it in my kitchen, and only had about 50ml leak into the drip tray I put underneath. Others have lost a lot more than that.

If I had to do it, I would either bring the frame inside, so that the hive didn’t get soaked, or I would open the frame in 10% sections, waiting at least 10 minutes before proceeding to the next section. I would check the slider for honey every 10 minutes and check the front of the hive for sudden bearding which could indicate flooding. I would only go on to the next section if all looked OK. A bit nerve-wracking, perhaps. :wink:

Great, Thanks Dawn. The honey seems very thick, which may be to my advantage,

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Harvested one frame today, very minor spillage, since the very bottom 2 outside comb was still uncapped, so I only broke open the first two segments, then after they drained, there wasn’t anymore that leaked. None leaked out the bottom.

I was able to fill 6 - 9oz jars from the single frame. For now that’s all I’ll remove, unless they fill the frame back in again and need the space.

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This is my ‘4 frame at once’ extractor. It worked a treat.

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They are fast… already filling it back in, most likely moving some of their stores around as well. There is a lot of activity today, considering it rained a bit yesterday.

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interesting there is still quite a bit of honey behind the round stopper on frame three.

They’ll eventually clean it out…


Still bringing in nectar and moving stores to refill the frame I drained…

You can see how they moved the honey from the outer frames, to refill the one that was harvested.

I have a different point of view in relation to bees moving honey around. I don’t believe that bees move honey from frame to frame as such. I believe that bees move honey out of cells in order for the queen to lay eggs in, but not honey frame to honey frame

The honey in the outside frames probably got consumed. Then fresh honey was probably added to the recently harvested frames.

that makes sense to me too jeff. Moving honey from one frame to another would be a lot of work without really achieving much except for neatness and house keeping. Bees are seemingly too efficient to do something like that. Many times I have seen cells start to fill only to then empty- they ebb and flow- and I assume it is just consumption outpacing production. When production outpaces consumption eh cells all start to fill.

I have been wondering about bees moving honey to give the queen room to lay- I have a hive that went queen-less for maybe 6 or more weeks and during that time the bees filled up almost all of the brood chamber with masses of honey and pollen. Now the queen has started laying- i am wondering if the bees have the capacity to make room for her to lay large areas. There are not enough bees to eat it all- and nowhere to move it to (i removed their super when they went queenless). I guess I should probably try and remove a few frames and give them to other hives and give them empty stickies or fresh foundation. Unfortunately I don’y have any stickies handy- and until the next lot of bees hatch out the numbers in the hive are a bit to low to build out the foundation quickly… It’s an odd position to be in for the bees- they are victims of their own success and hoarding propensities.

G’day Jack, happy new year.

Don’t worry Jack, the queen will only lay the quantity of eggs in proportion to the size of the colony. In other words, in proportion to the number of bees that are available to care for that brood. The queen’s laying will increase as the population increases. Therefore you wont have to worry if the bees aren’t building out the foundation frames.

This is talked about briefly in that video “City of Bees”. The part about how the queen only lays in accordance with how much she is fed.

On the subject of extra room, that is why I like the migratory lids. It’s a bit like a relief valve. They can start building & storing honey in there, if they want to.

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Hmm. Then how do you explain @Dee’s red dye experiment? She dyed some feed with red food colouring. In Spring, the bees moved the red syrup up into her honey super! :blush:

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