Harvesting off the hive

Hi, I want to know if anyone has harvested a flow super when it us not on the hive. I am trying, but the honey is not flowing. The ambient temperature here is 26 c at present, and the super is in direct sunlight and gas been for over 3 hours. Still no flow.
Should I out it back on the hive for the bees to warm it up?

The only thing I can think of is your flow super could be full of either crystallized or jellybush honey. Either of those would prevent the honey from flowing. I encourage flow hive owners to harvest the honey away from the hive as a means to cause minimal disturbance to the bees.

There is a potential for the frames to flood onto the brood, which can result in a major disturbance to the bees.

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Are you harvesting in or out at the moment?
If still in the hive only open say 25% at a time and operate the key multiple times back and forth. Once the flow starts then only go in further when the tube is less than half filled. The cells are probably not open. If you have 2 keys use them both at the same time on the outer edges of the slot. Taking them out of the hive defeats the purpose of having them and they flex more as they are not contained.
Good luck.

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I think I untangled your typos enough to understand the question… :crazy_face:

I have harvested 2 supers when not on the hive. I did them in the kitchen, tilted over a large baking sheet. My reason was that the frames were not fully capped, and I wanted to see how much honey would leak without damaging brood while I tried it. The answer was not much leakage at all - about 50ml from the whole super.

The second time I did this, I got no honey flow for several hours. I wondered if it had crystallized, so I lifted a cap with a cocktail stick. The honey was liquid. Then I realized that I had put the Flow keys into the wrong part of the slot. Duhhh! :smile: Once I tried opening the frame with keys in the correct slot, everything worked fine.

So I think that even though it gas been 3 hours, you shouldn’t need to out it back on the hive. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Welcome to the Flow forum, and please forgive my warped sense of humour. :blush:

Thanks for your input folks. Sorry for the typos. I have uncapped several cells of honey, and found it to be sugary, like honey goes in the jar after a while. Appears the bees have harvested something that has caused this. We have had a very poor year here, so perhaps they we’re desperate. We will try warming the frames. I will report back afterward.

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If you can warm the frames to around 48C for about 12 hours, that should do the trick.

Honey crystallizing in the hive is natural. The bees cope with that without any problems. I don’t think they know that the honey will crystallize quickly while they were gathering the nectar. They didn’t gather that nectar because they were desperate per se, in my view.

PS save the apostrophe for when you’re saying “we are” or “you are” for example. @Dawn_SD & I are very pedantic about grammar & spelling.

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Don’t worry about the typos. It does make the question harder to read, but I just love teasing people. I don’t mean to give you a hard time, just having a bit of fun. :blush:

In case you can’t liquify the honey, if you scratch all the cappings with a fork or cappings scratcher, the bees will often pull the crystallized honey out when you put the super back onto the hive. Especially if they have space in the brood box going into winter. :wink:

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as Jeff said- it’s nothing the bees decided- and possibly not even related to the nectar source much- I think it’s more likely that it has happened after the honey has sat i the frame for a long time. Or a combination of the two.

It’s a bit of an annoying scenario. When it happened to me I found that moderate prolonged warming did not help- and in the end I scratched the cappings and gave the frames to a hive to eat- by placing them above the hive- with the inner cover in between. It took weeks and weeks for the bees to chew out all the candied honey… but in the end they did.

about the only other solution would be to somehow warm the frames to about 48c over a prolonged period somehow and hope that the honey de-candies.