My brothers flow hive is filling up with honey fast. As part of our planned honey leakage/bee annoyance prevention strategy he had planned to harvest the frames incrementally over a period of days- two at a time. I suggested that he harvest the central ones- and them rotate them to the sides- so that the side one are in the middle and get filled and capped next.
That was the theory…
In practice the two outermost frames have more bee-space on the outer wall sides- these means the bees draw these combs out further and they can hold quite a bit more honey: the problem is if you swap positions then they are too fat to fit in the central part of the box without ruining the beespace for the adjacent combs. My brother did rotate the frames and now has a problem with his bee space. So much for the theory.
No. Jack is saying that once the bees have drawn the plastic frames out for capping, the outer faces may be asymmetrical. In that case, you need to put the frames back in the same position that they were when they were capped, unless you are wiling to scrape off the cappings from the outside face to correct the “bee space”. The point is, bees have a specific preference for the amount of space between combs. If your box is slightly too large (and the Flow super is a little large), the bees will build extra comb extending from the plastic cells to make the outer space what they think it should be.
Hi Jack, that’s a great observation. I think this is what beekeeping is all about, learning from your own observations. All this talk about “ask 10 beekeepers a question & get 11 answers”. Ignore all that.