Thanks, Full of liquid Gold. Cheers.
Wow @Wildfire, merbau is a great timber but itâs very dense. That means your hive boxes are going to be rather heavy methinks. My Tim used merbau boards for the decking at hame. It certainly is a beautiful wood.
Yes, thatâs right. Honey is so yummy it should be share, or maybe not! Anyway if my family want have the yummy honey in their tummy they can help. The two cleats on the ends of each box make it easy for two people to lift them. Rarely would the top supper need to be lifted if it was full of honey and so far I have had no trouble by myself with the brood boxes as they are already at waste height. However I have visions of being really really old and grey and bent over like a wind blown old Snow Gum and a bee house with engine crane/ hoist to do all the lifting. So I have a plan. Cheers.
Seattle bee-keeper: we have a flow hybrid and experienced similar issues as described in this thread. 2016, bees built out traditional comb and were busy all summer on the Flow frames, finally starting to fill them-but emptied them in the fall . Some were capped but mostly not. 2017 saw similar activity and we harvested 3 of 4 cut-comb deeps while waiting for bees to start using the Flow frames. They partially filled two, patchy, in July and them seemed to lose interest. We harvested one jar of honey before getting them settled for winter and rain . I was relieved to see similar stories in this thread.
Hi everyone.
I have a hybrid Flow super - no problems with getting the girls to use the Flow frames, but I have another issue. The small wood blocks that are nailed in on either side of the Flow frames have both lifted out while I was lifting the frames out for inspection, leaving a space that the bees can come through into the back of the frames (near the key insertion points). I have tried blocking the holes with newspaper, which worked for a while, but they soon dealt with it, and now I canât take the cover off without lots of bees coming out to investigate / defend!
Anyone else had this problem? Any advice about other materials I could use to block the holes?
Thanks.
If you can manage without the super for a little while, this idea of mine might help. If I have small gaps to fill in a bee box, what I do after cleaning off the propolis & wax is hammer a couple of 30 or 40mm galvanized flat head nails into the box so that the heads sit just under flush with the desired finish. Then I use Plastibond to fill the gap, shaping the square edge as I go. The galvanized nails acts as a secure reinforcing to hold the Plastibond from falling out. This is normally on boxes that get painted after a little bit of sanding later. It always works out well.
Hi Henfrey, do you have a photo at all?
I can see how this may have happened- on one of my flow supers when i assembled it I noticed some of the staples that held those two sticks in place were not properly âstapledâ. I added some more tacks to better secure the sticks. If you have a spare box you might want to lift out all the frames with bees on them- put them in the spare box- and quickly re-tack/staple those sticks into place then re-assemble. Otherwise it will be a pain whenever you extract or try to look through the rear window.
I made my own hybrid after watching the flow hive video and new that gluing two small pieces of wood to block the gaps wouldnât last. I use a small right angled metal bracket like those used to support a small shelf with one folded back on itself. I screwed it into the timber with small countersunk screws. Ensure you pre drill a pilot hole so as to not split the timber.
In the interim try get some very thin metal strip about 8 to10mm wide and poke it in the gap beside the flow frame and fold it back on the outside edge. You might have to shave a little off the cover piece. Long term see photos attached.