We live in Carina, Qld.
We started our first Flow hive in September '23 with a nuc, five plastic foundation frames and we added three without foundation. The bees drew out the frames and expanded their numbers fairly quickly and in December the Flow super went on.
In March we drew out our first honey, much to our delight and the delight of several of our neighbours and friends. Several frames were emptied over the summer/autumn.
We’ve slowly removed all the plastic foundation frames in the brood box so we are fully foundationless down there now.
Over our mild winter of '24 things slowed down a bit but yesterday we drew out five frames for about 13 kg , bringing our total to around 38 kg since we started.
We now have a second Flow hive all painted up and ready to go so we’ll most likely do a split in the next few weeks.
We’ve documented all our inspections, 24 so far, on YouTube for anyone interested. Not very compelling viewing but it is there mainly for our own records. However, if you want to see how a couple of absolute newbees went about beekeeping, here you go:-
Hi Clint, well done on making the videos. I have a few tips to point out, if I may.
First of all, it’s not good to expose brood to cold air during a full brood inspection during the wintertime.
Secondly: The best way to explain this is to get you to watch “City of the Bees” on Youtube. In that video, they show how a colony can grow to from memory, 80,000 during the summertime, & shrink to around 15,000 during the winter. Our winters not being that harsh, we can still expect a reduction in population. In doing so, the bees will replace brood with honey, especially on the outside frames. You can see on one of your honey filled frames how the bees did this in several stages. As you’ll observe now, the bees will be replacing honey with brood. You’ll see that happening in stages as well,
It’s admirable to want to go with foundationless frames in the brood box, however it’s not the best when it comes to beetle control, on account that bees will produce more drones, that don’t defend against beetles. The more workers, the better in all respects.
cheers
PS @ClintSC9 Yesterday I extracted honey from 5 & a bit supers. Today I graded the frames, so that some will get cut out in readiness for fresh wax foundation. The others will go back into brood boxes while making splits. These are 3 of the frames of the 2 boxes I’m cutting out. The main reason is, as you can see, a lot of drone comb.
Thanks for the feedback Jeff. Yep, we are aware of opening in the cold and we always only inspect on warm sunny days. We get lots of those down here in the lowlands. 
It’ll be interesting to see if the bees move all that brood box honey up to the Flow supers now we’ve made room. We’re waiting for a week or more since the recent harvest to let them decide what they want to do.
Drones, we aren’t too worried about, after all, we are only hobbyists and like to let the bees act naturally. Maximising honey production is not the primary goal. So we let them work out how many drone cells they need using their natural instincts. We like to think we are adding our nice calm genetics to the mix out there.
The drones head out around lunchtime every day and the unlucky ones return after a couple of hours.
I see your reason for cutting out drone cell frames, but that isn’t a worry for Flow users. There’s plenty enough worker cells in the brood box for our needs.
We help out with beetles, crushing them at every opportunity and utilising the bottom pest tray. But the surprising part is the girls have made a “jail” just under the inner cover, always in the same corner. Clever things they are. Our main discovery was that beetle numbers dropped dramatically after we removed the nearby compost boxes.
Cheers
Hi Clint, you’re most welcome.
You may have gathered by now that I sell bee colonies. I’ve sold a lot to owners of Flow Hives over the past 9 years. Over that time I’ve seen a lot (practically everything) that can go wrong with Flow hives. Without saying too much, I’ll just say that I recently sold a colony to a customer with a Flow hive. They lost their colony, on account that 3 days after harvesting honey, which also flooded onto the brood, the hive got slimed out, resulting in the bees absconding. After a big cleanup job, the owners were ready for a new colony.
Thanks, I’ll keep an eye out for that. It didn’t happen on our first major harvest although there was a small amount of spillage. A little this time as well, but we haven’t looked in yet with all this rain.
Good to see we Flow people are helping your business.