New beekeeper here! In New England it’s been sweltering hot! Been checking on the ladies daily through the windows. I’m noticing honey starting to collect behind the caps of the collection tubes. My frames are quickly filling with honey, but I do not believe any of them are capped yet. At least not since I last inspected on Sunday. Is this an issue I need to address, or is it because it’s just so hot? Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
On occasion honey will drip into the trough while the bees are filling the cells. This happens when the bees don’t do a completely thorough job of waxing all the joins in the cells. We have not found this to be an issue as the bees will still finish off the comb ready for you to harvest. If the honey is building up in the trough this can be easily fixed if you wish.
The Flow Frames are designed with a leak back point feature to enable any honey that does drip down inside the trough area to be recycled by the bees inside the hive. However if the leak back point gets blocked by the bees the honey may build up inside the trough and sometimes spill a little onto the metal strip. You can rectify this by removing the honey trough cap and inserting a Flow Tube or a small stick, to clear the bees wax and allow the honey to be recycled into the hive once more. Sometimes spinning the cap around a little is enough to clear the leak back point without removing the cap.
On the up side, it’s a nice opportunity to sample the Flow honey early!
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Thank you very much for the info. When I went to check on them in the evening I could see the bees trying to clean them out. It was pretty cute! I will take it off my list of things to worry about.
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Thanks, this is really helpful. I had the exact same issue. I rotated all the caps 180 degrees just now, and the bees immediately started cleaning up the soupy honey.
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