I’ll wait 3 weeks as you suggest and just observe through the windows until then.
A few workers are carrying pollen but not as much as a couple of weeks ago when the weather was warmer and there were more flowers around.
My hive is in Tanawha and is in part shade. I think it gets early sun and by around 10am it’s just dappled shade. It’s also facing North East.
I have a hive in Tanawah too. It’s one that was a split from the one I have at home. When it failed to requeen itself Jeff suggested I take a frame of brood from the home give and pop it in at Tanawah . Checked in on it a couple of weeks later and hey presto a new queen. It’s a beautiful colony very calm.
A quick update on progress. It’s been about 15 weeks now since I added the super and still no interest in the super. As @JeffH keeps reminding me, it will happen when the bees are ready. Honey production is not my priority so happy now to just wait for spring.
Yesterday I opened the hive to check that everything is well and noticed a few dead bees which seemed to be wet and sticky. Their abdomens also seemed quite dark. Those that were still alive didn’t look well at all. Probably 10 to 15 bees in total. The rest of the hive seems to be doing very well. I’m about to go away for 6 weeks so hope everything will be fine while I’m away. With the colder weeks coming up and plenty of room for the bees to expand I am expecting it will be fine.
Any thoughts on the wet and sticky bees with darker abdomens?
I now have 4 Flow Hives and experimented with ideas on how to get the bees best interested in the Flow Super. By far the quickest way was to use an old paint brush and painted melted wax liberally across the cells on every frame.I left one frame unpainted as a control and after 4 days all the frames except the control frame had bees working on them.
I’m at Coolum Beach and your not that far away for me to have a look with you if you think you might have an issue. Two pairs of eyes can be a help.
Cheers
Thanks @Peter48. So far I have painted the flow frames, pressed wax into them and moved 2 frames of brood to the super from the brood box. None of these tactics has worked, at least for now. It has been wet and cool recently so I think as JeffH has said, they’ll do it when they’re ready.
If I come home in 6 weeks and they’re still being stubborn, I will take you up on your offer.
Thanks for your help!
I have tried rubbing on burr comb but it was just a little better than a super completely as it came out of the box.
I agree with JeffH that the bees will use the Flow Frames if they are desperate but doing something to get them to accept the plastic frames is a better option. After all, plastic is totally alien to bees.
Let me know when you are back and I’m happy to have a look with you.
Hi Keith, I’m sure @JeffH will probably respond to this query with a more educated answer. Being a relative newby myself the only thing I can think of is that the bee’s have somehow drowned in honey. It isn’t usual unless they fall in to a fair amount of it though. Did you notice any other bee’s trying to clean them up ? (I sometimes have the odd bee drop in to my collection bucket when I harvest , I fetch them out and place them near the hive entrance and usually another bee or two will come help them clean up.
In regards to the flow frames, are there any bee’s at all up there ?
Hi Anita, after reading Keith’s query, my mind went straight to shb activity because I doubt that Keith did anything to cause a honey flood. “Wet & sticky” is characteristic of shb slime. I think at this stage @KeithB should pick a warm day to do a closer inspection. @KeithB, I hope you have enough time to do that before you go away.
A bloke who has bees about 3-400 meters away from my hives went to W.A. for a few weeks to work. When he returned home, he found one hive to be slimed out. Now his other hives as well as mine have a huge increase in shb numbers. I noticed that during inspections last week.
Thanks Jeff. Knew you’d have more to add.
I have noticed more SHB in my hives this year too but all seems under control with trapping measures.
I totally agree with you Jeff, if a SHB slime out is starting and not rectified then in 6 weeks time @KeithB could find a his hive has died out in that time frame. I have done my splits and because the colonies are in a weaker state I have added SHB traps between the brood frames as a precaution, as there seems to be more SHB in the hives at this time. Normally I rely on the hanging traps in my apiary.
I’m thinking your on the right track and when Kieth returns after 6 weeks I think it will be confirmed by a dead colony.
I wish Kieth had yelled out earlier if he had noticed a problem in a regular hive inspection, I’m not knocking him, bee keeping is often a learning curve from mistakes being made.
Cheers
Thanks @Peter48 and @JeffH for your reply. I hope you’re both wrong as it’s too late. I’m away! I have 2 shb traps on the bottom board and 2 traps between frames. There weren’t more beetles than usual at last visit. I’m wondering if I may have been careless with the vegetable oil when setting the traps last time. I was much more careful this time. I also hope you’re wrong because I have become quite attached to my little colony and will be devastated if they were to succumb to pests. Here’s hoping all will be OK.
It could be that vegetable oil if you spilled a fair bit into the hive is the cause of the deaths. I guess when you get back home a full hive inspection will give the answer. When you get back my offer still stands, my time is cheap; a mug of black coffee with sugar when we finish. 
Cheers
Hi Peter, it’s been a bit hectic here. It’s funny this morning, I split 2 hives while dressed in my bee suit with a jacket on top of that, it was so cold. I only found 2 colonies out of about 27 hives that I thought needed splitting. I’m going in the morning to take some more honey. I plan on extracting Thursday. I did my first robbing last Thursday. That was since late May.
I never thought about the oil in relation to Keith’s hive. Let’s hope it’s something as simple as that.
Anyway I’ll ttyl, cheers
As soon as Kieth mentioned cooking oil the penny dropped in my mind. I was pouring oil into a beetle blaster over one of my hive a few months ago and sneezed with a resulting couple of soup spoons of oil spilled into the hive, I figured no great drama, I removed the corflute for it to drain thru but 4 or 5 days later there was about 2,000 dead bees dumped outside of the hive, wet looking and gone black, much as Kieth has described.
I have finished my splits of about 7 hives and been extracting frames of a night at home. I’m taking 6 of the 8 frames just in case we get a run of cold weather, but so far it has been great bee weather.
A couple of cold mornings, my brother near Mittagong emailed me telling me about gale force S/Westerlies and snow at his place. Must have been cold as it is the first time he has used his fire to stay warm this Winter.
Cheers to you and Wilma
A quick update. I returned home after 6 weeks away and checked the hive straight away. Everything looks fine and there are a very small number of cells in the flow super (about the size of a 50c piece) with honey. It seems my bees have finally and tentatively begun to accept the plastic. I’m due to check again soon as it’s been 2 weeks already. Where does all the time go?
Hi Keith, welcome back. To answer your question: one day at a time.
Some of my colonies are only just moving into the honey super, while others would have swarmed weeks ago if I didn’t intervene. I’m slowly getting rid of the queens in the slow hives, so I can get the bees to make new ones, using brood from high performing queens.
Thanks @JeffH, it’s good to be home and just in time for spring.
When you’re a beekeeper with more than one hive, I can see you have so much more to think about.
You can have two hive a metre apart that behave and produce differently even if they appear to be the same size in numbers. That is just one of the challengers of bee keeping and makes it so interesting.
Today I had a new bee keeper in his first year spend the day with me at my apiary and again tomorrow. He has been nervous about how to manage his one Flow Hive but some hands on and lots of questions and he is getting confident about it.
I have done splits on more than half of my hives already this Spring, I began doing splits on July 7th. A few of my splits are exploding in numbers already while others are building up slower.
Having more than one hive can give you more to think about but it can also give you many more options that are not available to a one hive bee keeper Keith.
Cheers
Thanks @Peter48. I’ve heard the same from other experienced beekeepers. I guess I’ll have to consider it.
Think about it Keith, the longest part of of doing a hive inspection is getting your suit on and getting the smoker going well. There extra time for a second hive is an extra 10 to 15 minutes even if you go for a brood inspection. If one hive is powering on you can take a frame of brood from it and switch it with a frame of honey or not even used from the weaker hive so that a week or two later the hives are both equally strong.
Cheers