Perth (WA, AU) Flowhives and honey flow

Hi Adam, my interpretation is that they previously checked the frames before harvest which disturbed the bees. This time they relied solely on the rear viewing window before harvest & still disturbed & upset the bees.

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Thankyou, I will do that.

Hi guys,
I sent an email about 10 days ago, but haven’t heard back yet. Any idea on reply time frame usually?
Thanks heaps.

Allow me to directly tag @Bianca and @Freebee2…

:wink:

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Hi Tracey,

I don’t think we would have had a delay that long in our email responses since our initial crowdfunding campaign triggered an avalanche of enquiries!

I will take a look for your email, however, our replies do sometimes land in junk mail or spam so it is also worth checking there for a response…

Kind regards,

Free

P.S. thanks for the tag Dawn :slight_smile:

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Hi Tracey,

I can confirm that my colleague Frewoini (this beekeeping angel) emailed you 8 days ago - so it seems our email may have ended up in junk mail or spam as suspected! I’m so sorry if it appeared that your query was neglected. I’ll resend it now so you don’t have to scroll through for ages - and you should also be able to search for it by subject in your emails.

Kind regards,
Free

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Hi everyone.

A bit of an update on the local situation.
It is my first season in Perth hills and how different it is here from the suburbia. There I did not have to worry about this time of the year. Bees did not gather much but they were doing quite well. Here in the hills, it is a dead season now. Two box colonies manage better and one is even bringing a bit of nectar at the moment. Small colonies I started this spring from 4-5 frames eaten through their stores and went into starvation mode. Very little brood, no expansion. I am feeding them now.

I wonder how others are doing at the moment?

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Hi mate, this is the reason I use a WSP sized box super which is solely for the bees.
I haven’t had to feed since using this configuration. Quite different relying predominantly on native flora than down in the suburban garden flatlands.
The WSP also stops the brood arc in the super.:wink:
Beware the summer dearth.

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WSP or any other size honey super would be a nice thing to have with a domed or not :slightly_smiling_face: But it is new colonies that suffer at the moment. I simply don’t have extra honey frames for them. I took what I could from larger hives, but it was not enough.

By the way, just had a look at a baby formula for the first time in a while. Prices made me stare. And what obscurity in the description of composition! 18 dollars was the cheapest for 900g and contained soy protein in unknown proportion for that. It is cheaper to buy honest milk and grind polyvitamins into the mix to make a feed.

:face_with_hand_over_mouth:
People take note, the Hills will do this to you, must be something in the water.:laughing:

Probably a good year to be building your apiary ABB, you’d have been feeding them since September last year.

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Yeap, the beauty of living on the land. And I did not mention that I was thinking about where could I buy cobalt chloride or sulphate to make it a real thing :rofl:

11 years ago I was working in the vicinity of Murgoo Station and was staying with the pair managing it. I hardly saw the man because he was out of the house before I was coming for breakfast at 4 am and coming from the field after my diner at 7 pm. But I had a chance to talk with the lady of the house. We talked about sheep, the quality of the wool that becomes the best in the years of the highest heat (unfortunately sheep begin to die at the same time), her surprise about a fast-food chain buying feral goats they had on the station by truck loads. Just your usual table talk. Once I asked her, why are they still doing this? From the station condition, it was obvious that the exercise wasn’t particularly profitable. And she said, every year you hope that the next year will be better. I did not understand her then, but I think I understand her now :slightly_smiling_face:

Good or bad year, I tripled the number of hives I had buying only queens. And this is between work and renovation of the house I do mainly myself on brakes between the work. My bees is not a commercial thing and a few hundred kilogrammes of honey on a good year satisfy my needs for a couple of years a three. So, yes… at the moment I can say: ā€œI hope the next year will be betterā€ :laughing:

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Has anyone ever made use of a single frame display hive for show and tell purposes? If so, did you use a frame of honey and bees or a frame of brood and bees?

Any comments/advice based on your experience?

I use a 4f display hive. Everyone is more interested in the bees, brood and finding the queen. If I was to take just one frame I would take a frame with brood in all stages with room for a marked queen to lay.

Thanks. Yes, that’s what I was thinking (my kids want to take bees in for a show and tell one afternoon)… Except the mark rubbed off my queen and I’m not sure I’ll take the time to find her.

The planned day is mid 30s do I’m not too concerned about the temperature.

@AdamMaskew where did you get the 4f display hive or did you make it?

I made it. Cut out windows either side, made a three flow frame super with windows and harvest covers. It has latches and extra ventilation. When the flow frames are full I’ll do a demo flow frame harvest too.

Adam

For showing purposes, I would choose a frame of brood with the arch of honey and pollen ā€œinterfaceā€. With such frame, talk could be a bit more exciting :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi guys,
I have just come in from trying to do a small inspection of the flow frame section of my bee hive to take some pics and triple check it is all capped so I can harvest the honey without flooding my hive again.
I took out one frame and popped it to the side and then I slowly slid the others across just checking one by one. After checking over them all I slid them back into place and tried to replace the frame I had taken out and could not for the life of me get it back in. I was at it for AGES in, out, in out. Trying to re jig to fit it back together.
Meanwhile the bees where getting very cross.
Im feeling really disheartened.
Any advice?

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I had a similar experience with a clients hive. I was advised to remove the cover board, which seemed to work for me. Also from memory, I think the trick was not to replace the end frame last, or that might have been the other way around. I don’t use a Flow hive, only a clients whenever he gets into trouble.

ā€œI was advised to remove the cover board, which seemed to work for me.ā€

Hi Jeff, correct me if I’m wrong, but I would have thought that you must remove the cover board before you can get to the flow frames. Cheers, George

Hi @eweyfam,

I guess you have a problem with aligning frame spacers (endplates of the frames - transparent pieces of plastic perpendicular to the frame on both ends). When one puts it back in a well used super, it is hard to fit them shoulder to shoulder. New frames are made for a tight fit, but timber swells, frames gather a layer of propolis and there is no enough room to fit them easily anymore. End plates are quite thin and instead of forming a single wall, one of the endplates may slip behind of endplates of neighbouring frames creating an overlap. This pushes the opposite end of the frame against the box and it gets thoroughly stuck. What helps (somewhat) is to remove the back hatch and observe the endplate to make sure that it is inserted the right way from the beginning before it gets stuck.

A possible solution for Flowhive would be creating a quick-release system that allows removing side pressure on the frames before removal, but it seems there is little appetite for the development of the product.

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