Bees not filling Flowhive super yet... how long is too long?

Hello. New-bee here… I searched using various keywords for this being addressed already, but nothing matched, so apologies if it’s been covered…

I have a wonderfully strong hive (I think). Started out with a 5-frame nuc on 6 May and they filled the other 3 foundationless frames in 2 weeks. Put on the second box and the 6.5 of the 8 new frames were filled out by 3 June, so I went ahead and put on the flowhive queen excluder and honey super. The last 1.5 frames were done in about 4-5 days. Always have lots of brood and larvae visible (I take pics of my frames when I inspect so I can go back and compare).

However, it’s been almost 2 weeks now with nothing happening up in the honey super. They’re passing through the excluder just fine (note to Flowhive: I think the excluder as it comes sits a little too low for them to move comfortably around on top of the frames; I built and installed a 1/16" shim and they were much more mobile and seemed happier) and I have hundreds of bees hanging out in the honey super and in the cells, but aside from them depositing propolis in the bottoms of the cells, hanging out seems to be all they’re doing. The two bottom boxes are all full (including at least 1 frame that’s all honey); how long before I should expect them to start storing up there? Thanks!

8 posts were merged into an existing topic: How to encourage bees to use the Flow Frames