I have a huge amount of melaleuca flowering and the girls love it. Last season my flow frames were extremely slow to extract and the yeild was poor even though the frames were 80 - 90% capped. Does melaleuca have a trendency to glue up similar to canola?
Hello and welcome to the Flow forum! 
Canola crystallizes, but I believe that melaleuca is thixotropic, like manuka and heather honey. Flow frames are not really suitable for this kind of honey, and personally I don’t know a way of extracting it from them. With heather honey, there are specialized extraction methods which are the equivalent of shaking a bottle of tomato ketchup (which is also thixotropic), but I don’t think that these would work for Flow frames, as they involve either crushing the frames or piercing the wax caps with multiple needles.
Maybe @JeffH or @leahd will have some better ideas 
With melaleuca nectar flow, I would do what we did for canola (oil seed rape/OSR) and put traditional supers on for the period of the flow. You can then take it off at the end of the flow, and either feed it back to the bees, or crush and strain. There will still be a lot of lost honey with crush and strain, so the sticky wax could be piled into a small dish on top of the inner cover (over the brood box - no super) and the bees can use it to feed their foragers and brood.
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Thankyou for that info - Great to know! (Although sad!) I really appreciate being a part of this group!
Cheers! 
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Hi, welcome to the Flow Forum! – and thanks Dawn, that was great information.
Manuka honey and Jellybush in Australia are thixotropic honeys – and Melaleuca honey is often thixotropic.
This means they do not run or flow unless agitated. To date, we have not had any success removing Manuka from Flow Frames. This includes trialling a ‘honey loosener’ as used in commercial Manuka extraction.
Thixotropic honey is difficult to remove from any form of honeycomb frame. In order to extract Manuka honey commercial beekeepers must employ the following:
- Plastic foundation (to withstand additional force in extractor)
- Heat frames
- Prick cells by hand to loosen the honey
- Spin 3x faster and 5 x longer than for liquid honey extraction
Often bees will store a 50/50 mixture of ordinary honey and thixotropic, which we have had success harvesting by repeated opening/closings of the Flow mechanism which allowed almost all the honey to flow out.
If you do get Manuka or Jellybush in your Flow Frames you can try one of the following methods to remove thixotropic honeys from your Flow Frames:
- Flow Frames can be spun in an extractor, like conventional frames. You can attempt to extract the thixotropic honey by pricking to loosen, then spinning.
- Agitate the frames and then return them to the hive. The bees will clean up the honey and will relocate and likely dilute it so that the honey will flow on the next harvest.
- Scrape honey out of the frame if you want to harvest the honey – as the honey doesn’t ‘flow’ you won’t be able to strain it to remove the wax.
- A few people have been discussing Jellybush and Manuka honey on our forum, you are welcome to join the discussion: visit our forum to discuss Manuka Honey.
I hope this was helpful. Please let us know if you have any other questions – Leah
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Thankyou so much Leah. Great information!
Kind regards
Graeme
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Happy to help, Graeme. Be sure to reach out if you need any support 