Beginner's Beekeeping Q & A - (how many brood boxes to use, how to retrofit ant guards and other tips)

Hey everyone,

This week Cedar is jumping into one of our hives on-site to do some inspecting, harvesting and answering your questions as they come in.

Here’s the video:

And the transcript:

Enjoy! Let us know what you learned from this session below, or any experience you could add to the questions asked :slight_smile:

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i notice that the frame in the observation window on the left is open. is that because you have recently harvested it or is there in issue with the frame, or is it just deliberately open?

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Do bees ever use the flow frames to make bee bread, or do they always just use them for honey?

I’ve seen a lot of posts about cleaning of the flow frames. I guess my climate is similar to yours in Aus (maybe cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter). How often do YOU clean your flow frames? This question is just to ask what you, personally, do

Good noticing John! Someone asked the same thing on the live, around the 26min 49sec mark.
Cedar wasn’t sure why it was left that way - one of us might have just accidentally forgotten! He says on the video that if this happens, you can either try to reset them using the Flow key, or you may have to take the frame out, put it in a plastic bag in the sun to warm it up and soften the wax before resetting.

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I have never seen bee bread or pollen in my Flow frames. I think that is because they almost always put those resources immediately next to the brood nest, so that they can be used to feed larvae without having to walk too far to retrieve the stores. :wink:

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Hey John, are you asking me? I don’t currently have my own hive - although to be honest when I did own a Flow of my own about 4 years ago, I never cleaned the frames, the hive was always luckily a healthy one and they did a great job of managing them. I think it’s only necessary to clean the hives in case of disease. What about you?

that’s really nice to know Danika. I’m going to take my chances, leave the super on over winter (the lowest it has ever been is 4 degrees C and we always have flowers in the winter). Take care

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