Brilliant way if you can catch them. At least you have the right bees to start anew; lots of young ones to draw the wax and rear the next generations. Something you can’t achieve with a split.
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My flow frames have been in around a fortnight and the bees have been climbing over them and have filled wax between the gaps; but they haven’t drawn it out at all. I have 3 deeps under it, all with brood in (the top one is probably 10% brood, 90% capped honey.
I had the queen excluder under the flow frames (though probably didn’t need it based on the brood being only in the lower half of the third box). A couple of days ago I moved the queen excluder down one box to give two brood boxes and clear the third box of brood. I’m planning to harvest the honey and then have only the flow hive on top of only two brood boxes.
Hi all
I established a hive well before getting the Flow Hive. Once the Flow Hive was ready, I did a split and transferred most of the brood to the Flow Hive.
It was just over a month ago. It seems the bees have taken some time to get used to the flow frames. After a couple of weeks I saw they started to seal up the comb. Today I saw many more bees on the flow frames. Looks like they have gotten used to them. No nectar/honey in there yet that I can see.
I saw a bee pulling a small hive beetle out of a cell.
Best wishes
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Nice update, thank you Brother Joe!
Installed bees start of Jan
bees started sealing comb 1st week of Feb
bees started storing honey 2nd week of March
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An interesting read. My hive has been up now since mid-January when I was given a nuc which filled the majority of my brood box. When I looked at it a couple of weeks ago it was full of bees and looked healthy. However, while I’m seeing an increase in the number of bees investigating the flow frames area there isn’t any capping or honey production. This is a typical view of the side window, although there are more bees amongst the frames away from view:
This is my only hive, can someone please give me any tips on how I can encourage some capping and honey production?
Cheers
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They need good weather and good forage. Not much you can do about that. They are investigating the frames which is good. When did you put the flow super on?
I put the flow frames on at the same time I installed the nuc back in mid-January. I live in Brisbane, a sub-tropical climate. The neighbour who gave me my nuc harvests honey all year round.
Your flow super should go on a strong colony. Do fellow beekeepers run one or two brood boxes in your area? Take your lead from them. The brood box should have 80% of available space taken up by brood before you put on a honey super. It seems that you put yours on before the bees even drew out the frames below. This severely holds them back and they struggle to grow.
Thank you for your comments. My neighbour has hives with both one and two brood boxes; I don’t know if he has a preference. I don’t know if it is the volume of this correspondence or the continuing warm weather but the number of bees moving into the flow frames box has dramatically increased in the last few days! In time, I think I’ll add a second brood box, if only to give myself more working space below my new manifold. I make that comment with care, I realise there are more factors affecting that decision.
Gotta respectfully dis-agree here:
When a swarm of bees move into a wall cavity, scouts don’t choose a cavity just large enough to hold the swarm, they choose a large enough cavity to hold a full size colony with room for winter stores. Their growth isn’t held back because they chose a cavity that will hold them when they are at their fullest potential.
There is no comb or stores when they start off and they don’t have the benefit of someone feeding them.