Hi Jack,
Thanks for getting back to me, I’m not sure how to message you via this forum so just hoped you would see my question
Talking to a local pro on my Island and he takes is supers off over winter and freezes,then stores them away from the moth, he has all langstroth hives.
I like your idea of putting a ideal on your flow hive to get honey comb, after eating some wild comb I’m addicted and would like to try it myself.
Could you please give me some details on how to and when to do this ?
I’m hot on the trail of a queen breeder for you, he just hasn’t returned my calls yet
Regards Brian
Nope. Didn’t have to feed over winter. But I always leave 4 frames of honey on my hybrid super. Add that to winter flowering bottlebrush and a few other winter flowering plants around me in suburbia and the bees have sufficient forage
Good day. I have had drones before in the FLOW hive even with the queen excluder. This was because the queen died or left. There were no emergency queen cells. Therefore, the girls started to lay drone eggs in the FLOW area. When trying to extract, there were body parts and poop in the honey. I had to go through a second process of putting the honey through a strainer to get he remaining parts out. Cleaning out the cells - the girls did most of the work with the frames out of the super. But I still needed to wash out the remaining cells of partially trapped brood and bees that were caught in the honey removal process. Hence, loss of production and you can still have drone in the FLOW frames even with a queen excluder.
Not to worry about the queens as I’ve solved that issue for the time being.
We’ve only been using the ideal supers this year- there’s not much to it- we just put them below the flow super - and then later when they were nearly capped out then on top of the flow box. My brother wired some and used foundation- I did mine with all foundationless just using a 1.5cm strip of foundation as a guide. I ‘glued’ these in to the slot on the top bar with melted wax. This worked well with just a little cross comb- but mostly perfect flat virgin honeycomb.
If you are making honeycomb then I think early spring is the best time to use the ideal boxes. When a flow is on they can cap them out in just a month. I’ll have to wait to see if they can make more later in the season
@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.
@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 ) and then the bees cleaned up the cells afterward?
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
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…
@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.
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.
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)
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.
) and then the bees cleaned up the cells afterward?