Brood in flow frames really a problem?

About 10:30 into the video, he talks about brood in the flow frames https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EDiFw6gxEc

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@Semaphore I can’t speak for ideals but, for me last year, I put an 8-frame half deep (foundationless) on in early Dec (just as, or after, the spring flow was coming to an end) and it took all of summer for it to be built out, filled and capped. At the same time I continued with a hybrid and full-flow 6-frame super on top of a single brood box.

I can assure you that you do not want to spend an afternoon pulling larvae out of the Flow frames. I did that last year :slightly_frowning_face:

It’s also a nice video which shows how the bees clean up the Flow Frames if there is any crystalized honey etc left-over in them.
:honeybee:

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@Frederick_J_Dunn Do you have an update on what happened with the brood in your Flow Frames?
Did you make a video?
Did you just let them hatch (no comments please Dawn :wink: ) and then the bees cleaned up the cells afterward?

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Hi Faroe,
I didn’t have to do anything to remove the brood from the flowframes.
I simply allowed the brood to hatch and the queen migrated back down to the lower boxes on her own and the upper flow-frames were taken over once again with honey stores and it did function a little stiff on the first honey cycle, but has been fine since.

I had left flowsupers on three colonies and none of them had queen excluders in place. Only one of the three ended up with brood in the frames, the other two were used by the bees, exclusively for honey stores.

This winter, after the autumn flowframe harvest, I removed all flow-supers from every hive and staged them nearby for honey bee cleanup prior to putting them in storage. All is going well and we will just restore the flow-supers when the spring nectar flow is in full swing and the lower boxes are filling with the queens laying where they are expected to.

Sorry I have been absent from the forum for quite a while. I wish you all the best! Fred

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maybe it was the late in december thing that got you. We managed to get some ideals fully filled out before december. They were put on around September. Now they are back and are filling more slowly. From what I have seen the first two months of spring have a nice flow here- then things slow down. I am thinking the very early part of spring might be the ‘ideal’ time for ideals and pure comb honey… I am also hoping there is a second flow some time soon…

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@BeePeeker - that would be a chore! But, I figure if brood ends up in the Flow Frames … so bee it. If anything, I’d not extract until those cells are empty.

One clarification - this will be my first year using Flow Frames & basically experimental. So, that gives me quite a bit of flexibility.

Good to have more information on running without a queen excluder.

HI Gill, I personally don’t use queen excluders in any of my hives and haven’t for the past 11 years.
I DO, however, recommend queen excluders for new keepers, particularly those with flow frames on. Once they learn where the brood frames are and how their colony uses boxes at different times of year, then adjustments can be made in management.

Thanks again!

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For me, queen excluders are nice for isolating a queen when making a split - not totally necessary depending on method used, but I tend to find it convenient for determining which brood chamber has the existing queen.

But, I ought to mention that use of queen excluders is one hugely discussed topic among beekeepers. And like the old joke … ask 10 beekeepers the same question and get 15 answers (or whatever) :wink:

This is happening to me now with 2 hives. I’ve only been bee keeping for 16mnths. I have excluders on both. I think the hives swarmed without me knowing - there is evidence of laying queen in the brood box now.
I would like to know the step by step of how to deal with getting it back to just honey in the flowsuper. Would I start with harvesting all the honey?
Then, take a wash out? or is this when you leave the bees to clean most of it? if so, how long to give them?

Hi Jennie,
It sounds more likely that your hive is queenless and you have laying workers.
Pictures of your brood frames would help a lot with a diagnosis. Did you find worker brood at your last inspection?

I had a gentleman with me that has been keeping bees for 50 years at last inspection a week ago, and my reason for asking his help was to find out if it was queen-right or queenless. He said I have a queens in both hives after looking at brood frames. I do believe they must of been queenless for awhile and now have laying workers - would workers still lay if there is a queen down in the brood box?

Well, if the experienced beekeeper told you they are queenright, then they are.
I believe laying workers are unlikely in that case. I remember @Dan2 had such an issue once.

So he positively identified a queen in both hives? By seeing brood in the brood area doesn’t necessarily mean there is a queen. Was the identification done by looking at the cells and seeing that the cells were of normal size for the working girls or were they protruding with a domed cap?

The same goes for your Flow frames. Are the capped cells domed or flat? which I would presume the flat capped cells are filled with honey? The honey cells in the Flow frames could be confusing. I wasn’t expecting brood in the Flow cells but what gave it away was the domed capping of the cells. I took out the Flow frames and uncapped several of the cells to see the over sized brood. I also timed a couple from the time they had an egg to the time they hatched.

No queen. Capped cells in the Flow frame. It was obvious - the girls were doing what comes naturally, they were laying drone so they could impregnate the new queen. My problem was that there were no queen emergency cells.

I ended up pulling the Flow box off and then proceeded to open every cell and clean out the larvae. Time consuming I know and a lot of the honey cells were not capped either which left me with honey/nectar that need to be consumed quickly or make some mead.

This was my scenario.

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I took this pic this morning through the flowframe window

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Did they perhaps deposit some pollen in there?
Hard to make out. Doesn’t exactly look like brood.

Hi Larry,
Laying workers can only lay drone eggs. If the queen went up into the flow box, she also likely lays drone eggs, as the flow cells are too large for worker brood. But heard that happened before as well.
If a hive is queenright, there are no laying workers.
But then, in the bee world there are always exceptions to the rules. Rare though to have a queen plus laying workers.

he said there are 3 day old eggs of works bees in the brood box. I’ve just emailed him to make sure. We didn’t try to find a queen - he seems so certain.
I can see drone capped cells through the side window on the flowframe - for sure, no doubt.