Anyone not using queen excluder?

Wow, so it really is a good as traditional hive frames!!! :heart_eyes:

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Preach it sister! :grinning:

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DroneJuiceFrames TM

Yum!

Remember not to harvest your Drone Juice until the cells are fully capped :wink:

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[quote=ā€œSting, post:19, topic:10029ā€]
Bees still draw ā€˜worker size foundationā€™ out to fit drone brood if they want to.[/quote]

:+1:

Glad to see someone else pointing this out. Bees still make drone cells perfectly fine when using foundation.

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Then ask @JeffH for his fritter recipe! :smile:

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Eww. Just EWWWā€¦ ; - P

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Hi - My husband decided they excluder looked too small for the bees to get through, and left it off. We just went to check the frames, and low and behold, we have larva mixed in with our honey. Not sure what will happen when we open the flow frames, but I wish we had used the excluder!

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Please post here when you find out. I am very curious to hear.

I would guess you might get a lot of in-hive leakage, so be sure to open in small sections, so that you can abort if it is all running through the hive floor. :blush:

I am heading out to see a fellow beekeeper this coming saturday to help him clean out brood from the Flow frames after leaving the excluder off, there is some confusion amongst the beekeeping community where there is a belief that bees not filling Flow frames is due to the Queen Excluder. If you are concerned about the plastic excluder then I recommend change it for the steel one thats has the rounded bars but please leave the excluder in place.

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Iā€™ll let you know!

Joyce

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I would add to that, perhaps consider creating a top entrance during the nectar flow. You can do that simply by cutting a 2cm wide notch in one side of the frame of the inner cover. Or use a shim and cut a notch in that, but I prefer the inner cover concept. The other way is to drill a 2.5cm (1 inch) hole in the super, but that is much harder to remove when you are worried about robbing etc.

You should be ok to harvest still with drones or not. Iā€™ve tested this however you will need to dismantle the frames after to clean them.

Steel excluder is the way to go. I have found the plastic oneā€™s supplied slow processing on flow hives.

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Hi
We did harvest 2 frames of honey. We were so excited when they worked. We got about 10 pounds of honey, but there were about 6 small larvae in it. Not very appetizing, but the honey was still delicious! After that, we lifted the flow frame box, made sure the queen was not there and added the excluder. When the season is all done, we will definitely take it apart and clean it out.
This has definitely been a learning experience for us.
We have 2 hives, one looks great with bees in the flow frames, the second one, the bees donā€™t want to use it at all. At last look, we had 5 bees total on the frames! I guess we wonā€™t be getting any honey from that one at all. Any suggestions?

Joyce

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Were they bee larva? They may have been wax moth or small hive beetle larva.

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Well- we are assuming they were bee larva. When we lifted the frames, you could see them.
Weā€™ll check again this weekend and see if the other frames are ready.
Joyce

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You could try switching some of your harvested flow frames in to the other hive and moving some of the unused ones into your active hive. Adam

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That is what I will be doing with my second Flow hive next year. Only got to use one Flow super this year, but the next season should get a head start from the work our colony did this year. :wink:

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I used some metal queen excluders this year: I screwed them over my chicken coop windows so the foxes and raccoons canā€™t get in while the windows are open :slight_smile:

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they do indeed dawn- a very good head start. When we put mums frames back in after winter the bees were able to clean up all the cells and start laying in honey almost immediately.

This winter we all left our flow frames on the hives- and now 6 days before spring this is what I am seeing in my hives:

these frames looked completely empty four weeks ago.

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