Hello, to entice bees to new flow frames, I understand having some wax on the frames is recommended. What is the best way to apply this wax? I thought maybe heating it to melting point, then quickly brushing on? Just concerned the heat may damage the plastic in the flow frames, or just get some solid wax and rub it on?
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I simply rubbed excess wax from the brood box across the face of the flow frames. Took less than 1 minute, and required no heating or fuss. The bees moved in within 2 days of doing that.
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Apply melted wax to the frames is the most efficient but rubbing on the wax works nearly as well.
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thanks guys, also was it necessary to pre wash the new flow frames to remove any chemicals from manufacturing?
I tried a couple of methods to get the bee’s interest in my Flow frames including rubbing cold wax and brushing on melted wax. The fastest way I got their interest was by brushing on melted wax covering all of the cells and within 3 days the bees were up in the Flow frames after ignoring the ‘clean’ frames for about 3 weeks.
I did both those methods as well as a few others when I first got my Flow supers as an experiment to gain first hand knowledge on the subject after reading and seeing so much fore and against the Flow Hive system and being away from bee keeping for many years.
Regards Thomas.
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I didn’t wash my flow frames; they seemed very clean when they arrived so I didn’t see a reason to do so.
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OK, I agree with the above posts answering your questions, but I took the really easy, laziest way. It worked brilliantly for me.
- I did not wash the frames. They are made in Australia by people who love bees, so I just trusted them.
- During a routine hive inspection, I scraped some untidy (to my human mind) burr comb off the tops and sides of wood frames in the hive I wanted to super, and just smeared it gently like cold peanut butter onto the plastic Flow frame faces with my hive tool. It took about 5 minutes extra on top of a normal inspection. Very easy.
- When the hive was ready for the super, I put it (with the smeared frames) on top of the brood boxes and queen excluder. Within 2 days, bees, were all over the plastic frames.
- A couple of weeks later, I looked to see if the bees had noticed or were rejecting the new frames:
Do you think they liked it? 
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If your reference was about
When I said clean I was meaning I had done nothing to them Tim. I also didn’t wash them and saw no reason in doing it., I figured if there was something harmful to the bees in the manufacturing process then Flow Hive would have removed it.
Cheers Tim
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There’s some videos on this one:
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It has to be pretty messy to brush on melted wax. I assume the bees come in and clean up any ‘globs’ and properly seal the cells before filling with honey?