About 6 weeks into the first beehive. Had a good look today at the flow frames which have been in place about 3 weeks now. Lots and lots of bees crawling around and with heads buried in the cells - just no sign of any honey.
There’s been plenty of flowering natives neaby for a few weeks - although the weather has been cooler than normal (south west Victoria).
A quick look in the brood box - also plenty of bees and all 10 frames pretty full.
Hi Richard, you can try to brush on some wax on the flow frames to encourage the bees to start using them. If the brood box is full, I guess it’s a matter of time.
If you search the topic, there are a lot of threads on this in the forum and how to do it.
Did you do anything to the plastic Flow Frames to help your bees to use them faster or did you just add the super?
Quite likely you made the common mistake of adding the super before the bees needed it.
Either way, you are expecting things to happen faster than it will. You might in fact not have any honey in the super to extract in the first Summer Richard.
The bee have to seal up the cells in the frames and that is what they are doing now.
Cheers
Thanks both - I have put a small amount of wax out today to see if that helps.
Peter - what ‘should’ i have done to the frames to help them use them faster? I did just add the super - when there were still two untouched frames in the main box but I wasn’t going to be back for a few weeks and didn’t want them to run out of space.
When I bought four Flow Hives I experimented with lots of advice on the forum. What I got the best results from was ‘painting’ some melted wax over all the cells and the bees were working on sealing up those frames after about 2 days, rubbing on bur comb was a little slower by about a day or two, frames put in with nothing being done to them were not touched till the ‘waxed’ frames were showing a lot of honey with some cells capped.
Plastic is alien to bees, with fresh wax on them it was a very obvious poitive result. But if your bees are already working on the frames it may be best to leave doing it till you buy your next Flow Hive.
Cheers
Sounds normal to me Richard. You say there are lots of bees in the super with heads down. They are preparing the cells to store honey by filling the gaps. When they are done they will deposit the honey in them. There’s nothing you can do to speed up this part of the process.
what peter has said helps- but we also found on our first flow hive that the bees readily filled all the frames without us having done anything. A lot of it has to do with whether the bees have a surplus of nectar to store or not. If they do- they fill the frames- if they don’t they don’t- no matter what type of frames you use. For the record I now just rub a little wax on as if the frame was a cheese grater. Hardly any comes off- and only at the tips of the cells- but that seems to be enough to give the bees some ideas.
