Last week also there was a program concerning an Australian grower & seller/exporter of Citrus
australasica, Finger Limes. He was struggling because of regulations, however his point was that they were now being grown in commercial quantities in the US, China & Sth America. He was going to lose his market. We are missing opportunities & will continue to do so, if thinking doesn’t change.
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Hi Gervase,
Sorry for the delayed response have been away.
You don’t always have to feed your bees, but last year I could see their stores were low in the brood box as the weather turned, so I put my Ashforth feeder on to encourage them to fill out the remaining frames. Around January I also put some fondant in there as a precautionary measure that seemed to work quite well.
It seems your brood box and super are slightly smaller than mine, my brood box takes 10 jumbo Langstroth frames and I have 7 Flow frames in a Flow super.
My Flow Frames are full again so I might drain them again next week. After I drain them I plan to put a small normal super below the Flow frames and let the girls draw these out and store honey. This will be used as my winter stores. Weather depending they may start to fill the Flow frames, I’m not sure. But either way I feel I’m covered for winter stores this year and I’ll place the small super below the brood box when the time comes, and place the cover-board on top of the brood box. I’ll then put the Flow Frames on top of the cover-board and let the bees crawl up and clean the Flow frames out, ready for me to put it away for winter. I’ll therefore have the jumbo brood box full of stores and the small super full of stores and hopefully this will get me through - that’s the plan anyway!
Did you end up putting your Flow Frames on in the end?
Cheers,
Jamie
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Thanks Jamie
You have set up my winter program & I feel confident I can keep the hive going well & they’ll be in good shape for next spring.
I didn’t put the Flow Frames on in the end as the brood box is only about 1/2 full (at last peak). I nearly had a 2nd swarm to add & bolster the girls, but the swarm I’d collected from a tree had all flown by the time I went to get them. I’d left them to gather in the skep for most of the day & they must have found something more desirable. Oh well, I’ll just let these girls get on & build.
Happy honey collection this year & I’ll let you all know how I get on if I have things to report.
Cheers
Gervase
I have not had crystallized honey but propolis in the cells. There was no honey stored so I removed the super to start to get ready for winter. I cannot it
turn the crank handle. Has anyone else had this problem?
This has happened to a few people, especially if the Flow frames were on the hive when the nectar flow wasn’t very generous. You have a couple of possibilities to try:
- Put the crank handle into the frame just 10% of the way and turn it. If it turns, put it in another 10% and so on until you have the frame open. Doing this means you are not fighting so much propolis with each turn as you would if you put the handle in all the way and tried to turn it.
- At my local beekeeping meeting early this year, we had a Skype session with Cedar Anderson (inventor). One of the the things he suggested was putting the frame in the freezer for 24 to 48 hours. This makes the propolis brittle, and it separates more easily from the plastic when you turn the key. If you do that, I would try the key in 10% increments again, and make sure the frame is still cold when you do it.
You can then wash the frames in hot water (no more than 70C) to remove the propolis. Some people suggest dismantling the frames, using the honey flow video instructions, but personally I would just try the above maneuvers first, especially the freezer trick, as you may be able to knock the frozen propolis off without making it all hot, smeary and sticky as you would if you tried washing the frames.
Please let us know how it goes! 
One thing that just crossed my mind. Have you got sticky bees? Some bees glue everything up. Buckfast are pretty god at it. My super frames are all ebelished with propolis
Interesting that you mention that @Dee, I think there are regional differences too. In Oxford, our propolis was mostly dark brown and quite hard. In southern California, it is much lighter and more like chewing gum in texture - the kind you find on the bottom of your shoe when some anti-social thug has dropped it somewhere… The Oxford stuff was easier to handle to my mind, the SoCal stuff smears all over the place like cold Marmite… 
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Dawn- thanks for the tip. I have not had a chance to try it yet but will let you know if it works for me!
Feed back is very helpful - I don’t want to be giving unreliable advice! I learn every day, so your experience contributes to my learning too.
I have a press very similar to this one imported from Italy. I find this a very slow/painful way to process honey/comb and use it only when I need to crush honey out of native hives that have been recovered or honey out of cappings.
You also need to make some minor modifications to a press like this to improve the extraction yield (main issue is the ‘plungers’ rarely press far enough down into the basket).
The theatre of extracting honey like this is something people appear to enjoy watching… but make sure you leave the cleanup to someone else!
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Josh I have just received our first flow hive and I am setting it up next year. i see you had the same concerns I had last year with Rape seed. How did you manage in the end ? you suggested you might use ordinary frames to start with and move to the flows later ? best regards Jason
I have just got some heather honey
Pressing it is one thing
Straining is impossible
Hi Josh
How did you get on with your Flow HIve and the OSR this year?
Has anyone in Australia or NZ used the flow frames yet to extract tea tree/Manuka honey and how did it go?
I’m a glass half empty on this one.
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Hi,
I’m thinking of planting about 30 tea trees, Coastal, Jellybush & Manuka at a friends property near the Hawkesbury, Aust. The property/area has a good mix of gums & orchards, we have had nectar flow since we installed the girls in Dec. Do you think that that amount of tea trees would produce enough nectar to effect the honey consistency in the flow frame ? We would like to have a bit of tea tree honey but not if the honey won’t come out of the frames.
I don’t imagine that you would get any change in consistency given the number of flowering options the bees will have and given the numbers of trees that you intend to plant. Someone out there will have some better info. hopefully. It leads me to the question of how far bees usually forage? I have read somewhere that they prefer within approx. 700m (less than 1/2 mile) radius of the hive.
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I’ve been told they forage up to 3kms from the hive, sometimes more if needed. There’s not much flowering at the moment on my friends property but the orchard about 2km away has flowers and the girls are collecting plenty of nectar.
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Can I ask one thing.
Is tea tree actually attractive to the bees in the presence of other flowers?
I know in the uK bees will forage heather if there is nothing else but put them on the edge of moorland well provisioned with other flowers they ignore the heather…most of the time
I recall reading somewhere that Manuka in NZ grows on quite barren land where not much else would grow. So the bees wouldn’t have much choice.
I have the odd jelly bush on the land that flowers a long time, yet I never saw a bee in it. Too many other fine choices maybe?