Girls are filling the frames

I have had the flow frames on for a little over three weeks. During the inspection yesterday I pulled each of the frames to see how the bees progress was truly going. I was pleasantly surprised to find four of the six frames 2/3 full on each side of capped honey. The two end frames had the least amount but were still on their way. Here are a few photo’s.

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In three weeks?! I am SO jealous!!! Where are you located? Did you start with a package or was this an established colony?
We’ve had ours up there for many weeks and they’re just filling in the cell gaps still…

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Wow, nice, congratulations! When you harvest, may I suggest:

  1. Open about 20% of the frame at a time, and wait a few minutes for the flow to drop off before you open the next 20%. That way, you might reduce honey loss back into the hive.
  2. Don’t drain more than 2 or 3 (at most) frames in a day, to avoid this kind of situation:
    Post Flow-Hive harvest

Please let us know how it all goes, I am very excited for you! :blush:

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Now that I look back at my notes they have been on for closer to a month. I am located in Livingston, Montana. This hive started as a five frame NUC. Took them about a month to fill up the first 8 frame brood box. I added the second brood box and checker boarded the frames between the lower and upper brood boxes. Within ten days they had both boxes over 80% full. I waited another week and then put the flow super on. Here we are now. I will add that we have had about a week of temps in the nineties and this next week will be pretty similar. We have entered our high fire danger season and everything has really dried up. I will probably take them off in early August. I want to make sure that the hive is set for the fall/winter.

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I watched a video on youtube that a flow hive owner didn’t follow those instructions. They had quite a bit of honey that leaked thru into their hive. I will definitely take my time when harvesting the honey.

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Brilliant. I bet you’re pleased. Capping like that wouldn’t happen that often here in the uk. I mean capping as they go. Here we don’t get a constant steady flow. We get dearth and sudden plenty and a godd strong colony would suddenly pile in more nectar than the frames could hold. Two years ago we had a bumper year and in three weeks I had five national supers on one hive with none of it capped!
I heard tales of folk with more!

UPDATE!

Well I figured I would post the results of the harvest from my flow hive. I harvested two frames that were 100% capped two weeks ago and then harvested the remainder of the frames this weekend. I have placed all of the jars I filled beside one another. The jar on the far right was completely full but I have given away a few pint jars to friends already. In that two week time frame the girls filled the two that I harvested back up. It wasn’t capped so I emptied the frames into a flat pan and am feeding it back to the girls.

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Fantastic, congratulations! :blush:

What does it taste like? Can you pick out any particular floral accents?

I think it would taste good.

I can taste slight differences between the frames but I haven’t tried smelling the difference between them. Not sure I could tell what was what either. I suppose I need to get better at knowing what is in bloom at a given time so I can pick up on the smells.

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I suppose, unless the honey’s from a plants with a very distinctive scent that you’re familiar with it will be hard. I had recalled someone who posted about raspberry honey, and just wondered if, as you mentioned there were distinct differences between frames or if you had something familiar. At my favourite Bee Supply shop in Melbourne they have many different honeys & I was amazed by the different ‘bouquets’ & flavours, something I’m really looking forward to tasting in my bee’s honey.