I took the Tung oil/citrus oil route for painting my FH last year. Clearly it is breaking down already and I plan to switch to a more hardy, outdoor rated finish (planning on intergrain ultradeck or sikkens HLC which I use for my deck).
Anyway… cant paint with the bees inside so I was planning on building a super, transferring, paint/offgas, then switch back.
Only problem is that flow frames don’t fit a regular super right? Is there a temporary solution anyone has for this?
(Will be waiting til early spring rather than the current “winter” in Brisbane)
They do fit, they just don’t fit perfectly. If you are not going to be harvesting, then you can put them in a normal box. The fit is good enough that you can leave them in a normal box on the hive, if you have to do that. For preference, I just take them off the hive completely if they are empty, and reseal the box at that point.
Hive repairs traditionally is a winter chore
Why not to buy complete painted traditional hive and transfer colony there while day temperatures are good? It will give you plenty of time to work on your FH. Hive will survive without FH super for few days.
Then you have options:
Move you colony back to FH.
Put FH super on traditional hive if you want it there for winter, but temperature is too low for colony transfer.
Leave colony in traditional hive till spring without super.
Split colony next season and have/sell second colony.
@Dawn_SD ah that’s great to hear that flow frames do fit a regular super, even if imperfectly. It just so happens I have two spare supers sitting around so I can use them.
They will need to be deep boxes, not medium, WSP or ideal size.
Having said that, you could stack 2 mediums and put the Flow frames into the stack. There may be a gap underneath depending on the exact depth of the boxes, but if you leave it for only a couple of weeks, and there isn’t a good nectar flow, you should be fine.
So I moved them today (FH super and brood box) into two full depth “regular” supers. They weren’t too happy about it, cloud of angry bees but transferred ok.
I will say though that the flow frames did not sit into the super properly (slightly too high) and I could not put the inner cover back on - I guess this is what you ment Dawn by the flow frames not quite fitting.
The FH telescopic lid did fit still to cover everything but it’s not ideal. Should be able to move them back in 48 hours so hopefully it is still warm enough for them to survive… absolutely loaded with bees and honey so I imagine they’ll just ball up for tonight’s 8 degrees (celsius) night
