Firstly- relax! there is no great hurry or worry. The bees will be fine on the old frames assuming all else is good with the colony. .
However if you got a nuc with old frames in it- a hotch potch- then for sure I’d want to cycle them out over time.
Assuming you have now put that nuc into a full brood hive with 8 frames? Or ten? How long ago did you install them?
Either way it’s quite likely you put the nuc frames in the middle with new frames on the outside. Once the bees have filled out all the new frames you can start thinking about moving things around. What i would do is pick out the worst, oldest looking of the four nuc frames- and start to move them towards the edge. If all the frames are covered in brood then you could just grab to the outer two frames and swap them with the two inner old frames. If the box is not yet filled out- you might just want to move the frames one move towards the edge for now.
Then coming out of winter- often the frames on the outside are all capped honey- or largely empty. Then you can remove. A lot really depends on the exact state of you hive though… tell you what- if you PM me your phone number I will be ahppy to briefly discuss it with you. It’ll be easier than trying to write all the possibilites here…
i think its worth making the point, since most here seem to be from Australia, that the presence of Varroa makes the cycling out of old frames to avoid disease buildup very important.
Varroa, by mechanical transmission and by destroying the fat body in the bee (its liver and source of its resistance) dramatically increases the incidence of disease, especially viral diseases which were not seen before.
As I mentioned above in Europe cycling out frames every two years is seen as good practice, with some beeks doing it every year.
This is sad. Its also sad that you feel rejected by traditional beekeepers in your area. Most beekeepers love talking about bees with other beeks, no matter what equipment they have.
The flow hive is just a differently designed super which does away with needing to spin or press your honey frames. Everything else is the same.
The real issue for traditional beeks is that some newbies do believe that flow hive is maintenance free beekeeping, that all you need to do is pop a hive at the end of the garden and leve it alone except for the few occasions each year that you turn the taps to harvest your honey. They are right to discourage that thinking - the thinking, not the hive itself.
Now that you have shown yourself to be a proper beekeeper (your question shows this), do try to re-engage. Beeks everywhere are good company, and theres always plenty to talk about and plenty of experience to be shared.
I find it annoying that a nuc often involves getting old frames with it, but that is maybe just me.
When you want to cycle out old frames the idea is to move them to the outside positions of the brood box especially in winter where the bees will emerge and more likely that frame will become a stores frame as the brood cluster reduces in your Winter. You can then remove that frame, extract any capped honey, cut the wax out of the frame, clean it up and fit new foundation to go back into the brood box in the outside position in the Winter, come the Spring the bees will build that frame out with comb for the expanding colony.
If your wanting to cycle out brood comb in your Spring/Summer what I do if the hive is a Flow Hive is to put an empty Langstroth box above the Flow Super and move a frame or two from the brood box into the top box to emerge there. Checker board new frames into the brood box and the bees will quickly build out the new frames with comb for the queen to lay in. When the bees have emerged from the old comb in the top box you can remove it, cut out the old wax and render it and clean up the old frames, fit a sheet of foundation and your ready to cycle more frames.
Hope that explains it to you. Cheers
Thank you JeffH, it just occurred to me that one way to cycle out the old frames is by splitting and selling a nuc. I guess that is not ethical, but that’s how I ended up with dark old comb in the first place. Maybe I’ll just use one of the other methods to keep my conscience clean.
This made me wonder whether any wax build up in the FLOW frames also need to be somehow renewed. If that’s the case, how?
Thanks for your encouragement JimM. I’m actually glad I asked this question here as I learned a lot more than I was hoping for.
From the answers above I see that many of you not only have vast experience in beekeeping, but also knowledge gathered from literature. My main go to book is R.Owen’s Australian Beekeeping Manual, which is quite basic. Can any of you suggest some other books which are a step up from this please?
And I am sure that our modern life style where we are continually battered with “fresh is good” “clean and bright” is healthy has a bit too do do with that. The mind is a powerful weapon.
Some of my Flow frames are really very dark and my newest Flow has clean bright frames. When the nectar flowed and those bees stashed it away, both Flows go from left over Winter, to full in less than 2 weeks. I could not discern any taste difference, nor tell a difference in the colour of the honey in the jars, between frames, let alone hives. Nah I don’t go along with the age/colour of the wax making any difference in taste or colour if the time of collection is the same
Not always… For example chewing comb honey from a comb that was used for many generations of brood is very different experience from doing the same with a new one
I just saw a Flow marketing video this morning and Cedar was “bench testing” a Flow frame, and said that honey from Flow frames tasted better because it hasn’t gone through a spinner.
My wife certainly thinks so. She also thinks our carrots and other produce from our garden are better than store bought. They all taste the same to me…
I can’t pick honey from a Flow Frame to a Langstroth frame after extracting them both straight onto a tea spoon, some say they can taste the difference. Add it as a sweetener to coffee or on toast and if it is from the same flora I think if it was picked it would just be good luck.
I know a guy who works for Queensland biggest beer brewing company and he told me with a straight face the only thing different on their stubbies was the labels
Cheers
Sorry but I have to disagree, my mentor 47 years ago was a commercial bee keeper and a ‘stickler’ for taking brood frames out after two years. He said that eventually the hive will have smaller bees.
Last year I went to a beginner who had a couple of issues with his one hive which he had got from a friend. What I found was that the bees were noticeably smaller in size. He indeed had a few issues but I also swapped out 4 old frames (almost black) from the brood box as that was all I had with me on the trip. A phone call 8 weeks later was about his hive was being attacked by bigger bees and he was really worked up so next day another 250k trip each way to Warwick and sure enough some of the bees were larger going into the hive. They were ‘normal’ sized bees. So I removed the rest of the very aged comb with new frames with foundation. Six weeks later an email arrived saying that all the bees were ‘the big ones’.
So my thinking is a smaller bee can’t fly with the same amount of nectar so the honey yield will be reduced. And as you say a shorter tongue must make foraging harder for a smaller bee. Problem solved, sort of by accident because I wanted to cycle out his old frames, no idea how old, as a courtesy not remembering what I was told all those years ago.
Cheers
Hi Ruttneri, yes cycle them out by splitting for sure. The last frame I posted, the one I like to see in my brood is also the frames I like to include with my nucs. There’s nothing wrong with a dark brood frame in my opinion if the worker comb acupies the vast majority of the frame, as in that photo.
A couple of other forum members recently got sold nucs where the supplier was getting rid of rubbish frames. Those suppliers should be ashamed of themselves, they’re just taking advantage of the fact the new beekeepers didn’t know they were rubbish frames.
Thanks Jack - that’s excellent info!
I got the nuc around Christmas time and put them in an 8 frame brood box. I added new frames with wired foundation to the outsides. I left the bees to settle in. On first inspection there was a huge ants nest in the roof cavity. I got rid of the ants over time, mainly with diatomaceous earth and emptying out the roof cavity daily (inner cover on and closed). The colony took a giant wack and I wasn’t sure if it would be wiped out. I fed them for three weeks (2:1) after a bit of time it finally bounced back. Three weeks ago I checked and it still looked pretty weak and the queen was wondering around by herself on a mainly empty outer frame. I was then thinking they might not make it to winter but they had built up some honey stores. Last weeks inspection, they looked back on track with plenty of capped brood and honey stores.
I was quite excited/relieved and thought they might even get through winter.
I’m keen not to knock them around any more but at this stage they have four plus two halves of frames of brood, good supplies of honey at the tops of the frames and the two outer frames. The two outside frames have barely been touched. Is it a good time to move the outside frames in or should I just leave them alone? My plan is to start feeding them again when it gets colder and continue if they keep taking it.
They never filled the brood box so I never added the flow super. I’m still finding the odd ant but in very small numbers and never seen any SHB or disease indicators.
If you recommend I just chill and wait til spring, I’ll definitely take up your offer of a quick chat. Thanks again
Thanks for the great info Peter! A couple of weeks after buying my nuc, I found something online…‘10 Questions You Should Ask Before Buying a Nuc.’ I wish I’d seen it before hand. The other thing that I noticed was the queen’s mark was yellow. Unfortunately, I don’t know if she was marked according to the year or just with any old colour. If it was according to year, she would already be quite old.
I have still got two new empty frames on the outsides of the (8-frame) brood box as the hive has been quite weak. It’s now recovering well from an ant infestation, so I could reposition these new frames if there’s no risk to weakening the colony again.
Thanks again!
Try feeding 1:1 instead of 2:1 as a booster to the colony for the ‘here and now’. 2:1 tends to get stored in the comb for food in lean times. It might help getting the bees interested in building out the comb on the new frames. If there is good foraging about the bees will leave the syrup.
With Winter coming on down there I would leave those frames to the outside of the box and they might ignore them till warmer weather in the Spring when extra brood space is needed. They maybe thinking that the frames they have now is enough for the brood so that project is being held over.
Cheers
