Remove Flow super for winter?

Beekeeping - Basics
1

Hi All,
This will be my first winter keeping bees and I live in Michigan, USA where it gets pretty cold. I have a Flow Hive 2 with two brood boxes and one super. The super is almost full of capped honey. Top brood box has honey also. Queen excluder is in place.

Questions:

  • Should I remove the super before winter?
  • If I don’t remove it, will the Flow frames be damaged by the cold weather?
  • What are the other considerations?

Thanks

2

Hello and welcome to the Flow forum! :blush:

Yes definitely. I take mine off in July, because we don’t have any nectar flow after that time.

No but they may be damaged by the bees gumming them up with propolis, which they start to do when the nectar flow drops off. That is why I remove mine in July. It is perfectly safe to freeze Flow frames, and I do that to kill of wax moth and small hive beetle eggs and larvae before storing the frames for winter.

There are many, and if you use the magnifying glass search tool at the upper right, you can see that we have discussed this on the forum many, many times. Here are a few to get you started:

  1. If you leave the super on, you will need to leave the queen excluder on. If your bees cluster (yours definitely will in Michigan), the cluster may move up into the super, leaving the queen behind to freeze and die :cry:
  2. If you remove the queen excluder, the queen may move up into the Flow super earlier in the year than you think, and start laying there. That makes a huge mess and makes harvesting difficult or impossible. You have to take the frames apart to remove all of the cocoons. Time consuming and undesirable. It has happened to several forum members, so I would never do that
  3. If you leave the super on, the honey in it may crystallize, making it next to impossible to extract. You can’t harvest it with the Flow method, because the frames won’t open and the honey won’t flow
  4. If you leave the super on, you can’t treat for varroa. You should be doing mite counts at least every couple of months, and many treatments are not compatible with having a super on the hive

Hope that helps, but please do search and read the wealth of other information that I haven’t re-typed here. If anything isn’t clear, just ask again, and we will do our best to help you out.

:wink:

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