SHB concerns from a newbie

Hi Christina,
I like to do the first harvest after winter off the hive, as I experienced some leaking due to the flow frames getting clogged up with candied honey over winter. Never happens in subsequent harvests.
I set the flow super on top of a large baking tray in my quad trailer and harvest as usual.

Exactly.
I also suspect that some have increased the tilt angle past the 3 deg to hurry the process and this may be a cause of leaking.

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Sounds like it would certainly be more likely to cause an airlock and back flow with a viscous fluid like honey! :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

Wow - I get it, but not the reason I purchased a flow hive.

Our frames came all fully assembled from flow, so we just built the box and added the frames to the flow super. Could the problem be that the wire is too loose and caused leakage? Im very interested to know of anybody has spoken to the flow team about this issue and what they say - as this is not a cheap hive. Now Im.worried we should have tightened all the frames before getting our bees remotely interested in them???

If you just get 2 fingers under the wire that you see on top when you take the roof off, you should be right.
All my flow frames purchased lately were tight enough. Only had to tighten one lot of the very early models.
Did you open and close all the frames before inserting into the super? It’s a precaution to ensure all cells are closed, in case they got rattled during transport.
Don’t worry too much, first harvest can leak a bit. After that, the bees will propolize and wax things tighter.

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I didn’t open and close them, but I went through and used the key to close them about three times in each frame. Would it help if we put a solid board underneath the flow super- just for first harvest of each new frame? How long does does the leak last if it happens at all?

You can’t tell. Sometimes it’s only a small section leaking.
It could get honey messy with a solid board under the super, might get all sticky. Then it would be better to just put it on a frame or a couple of bricks with cardboard underneath.
I never had much leaking with first harvests, only with overwintered honey harvests.
If you start turning the key in small increments, you can always abort the harvest if you notice a lot of honey ending up in the bottom tray or coreflute. Just go slow. It’s usually not that bad and you might not get any leaks at all.

Well thank you for the tip. I never would have thought to take it off the hive to harvest. So if we were only harvesting one frame at a time, we would have to remove it for every frame?

Hiya Christina, removing 1 frame allows you to see the 2 adjacent sides so really you don’t need to remove all frames.
And for the record I have never removed a frame to harvest and i have done many harvests now. Without side support and the use of 2 keys the frame will twist and you will get leaks opening the Fframes outside the box.
I use a half sized super between the brood and Flow super which mitigates leaks onto the brood to a degree.

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I got to know my flow hives, like Jack, I don’t inspect the frames before harvests either. I might look at one during normal inspections, but I’m always sorry to destroy their beautiful propolis work. It’s their immune system so to speak.
You will get used to working the flow hives. And if these are your first bees altogether, everything is so new!
The forum is always here for you to cheer you up and give some guidance.
Chin up, trial and error are all part of learning.

Hi @Christina_Tremain & Peter. Slumgum is as Peter said. I don’t bury it anymore. When I used to, I buried it deep, hoping the beetles wouldn’t get to it. If it’s buried shallow, hive beetles can find it & they seem to love it. Especially if it’s wet after a lot of rain.

What I do now is shred it with sugar cane trash & other stuff that needs shredding to greatly dilute it, which makes a beautiful mulch.

Hi everyone, there is always so much discussion about harvesting the flow frames on/off the hive, leakages and so on here on this forum. Here are my opinions and observations:

I am a fairly new to beekeeping, close to ten years, so I just got rid of my L plates and got my P plates (red) now (not sure if non-Australians make sense out of this:). Seriously, I still consider myself as a beginner beekeeper and never will reach the experience of let’s say JeffH (because I started beekeeping to late in my life to be able to catch up with him:)) and I learned heaps from him posting on this forum. Thanks Jeff.
Last season I harvested close to 2000 kilos of honey out of our flow supers, so at an average of 3 kilos per frames that works out at about 650 plus frames, therefore I might have some qualifications to comment on this:)
ALL extractions have been done ‘in-situ’, I never would consider taking it off because it would be defeating the purpose of having a flow hive. Furthermore, in more than 90 percent of extractions I did harvest all 6 flow frames (on 8 frame Langstroth boxes) together in one hit. I certainly wouldn’t do that as a backyard bee keeper with one or to hive. Waiting for all six frames to be full and fully capped would risk that the bees are running out of room and might get some ‘silly’ ideas. I have to, as a small semi-commercial honey producer with about 35 flow hives in five different locations, I cannot drive around every few days and extract a frame here and a couple frames there. I wait before the whole box is full and than extract the full box, but I do use ideal supers above the flow super for honey comb production, so they shouldn’t run out of space to quick…
I do have a meticulously record keeping system in place and took notes of each single extraction. I wrote down the visual amount of leakage for each of them, divided in ‘no leaks’ (no visual honey on the core-flute slider), minor leak (lets say a dollop of honey the size of a ten cent piece on the slider), medium leak (50 cent piece or 50 mm patch of honey on the slider) and major leak meaning honey running out the back from the core flute slider (all my hive are tilted back at 2-3,5 degrees). All this is on one single brood box, no doubles. Now, I am fully aware that because no honey has ended up on the core-flute doesn’t mean that there were no leaks into the brood box, but in my opinion if there was, the bees easily handled the situation and controlled the spillage within the box. After extraction, I never open the brood box, I am sure they have enough to deal with without me creating upheaval in there. And no, I never observed any honey-covered bees walking out the front.
So, that’s my rating system. The results were: never had a major leak, about 10% of extractions had medium leaks, 40% had minor leaks and a full 50% had no leaks at all. But even with a medium leak I never felt uneasy, the bees seemed to handle the situation, didn’t seemed to be stressed, no bearding and no sticky bees evacuating out of the hives. One interesting fact: the non-leaking hives always were the same and had a history of a number of extractions leakage-free in a row (because of an exceptionally good flow last season some hive I was able to extract every three weeks, all frames). So after a while I started to learn and know my non-leaking hives and didn’t bother about checking the flow frames visually and taking them out, just making a judgement through the observation window. My ‘minor’ and medium’ hives I kept checking the frames before harvesting. I only extracted when the frames where 100 percent capped, even then occasionally I would get a couple of cell columns, usually at the very end of the frame on the extraction sides, uncapped and in my opinion most of my minor to medium leaks came from that area, meaning the leak wouldn’t necessarily be over the brood area.
When I do extract I ALWAYS do it in increments, usually 5 stages with about 10 minutes for each. According to Cedar the flow frames are designed to take the full flow in one hit, I never did and don’t want to take the risk, also it wouldn’t be much of a time saver for me. It would save me maybe 45 minutes in total. That extraction time I use productively to work on other hives in the same location that won’t get extracted, usually the extraction on the other hives is finished before my work on the other hives.
Furthermore, I always us two keys to crack the frame, rotating them in opposite directions, that fully eliminates any side-flexing of the frames. I can’t understand why the Flow people don’t supply the hives with two keys (like why they supply that ‘crappy’ plastic queen excluder) and I believe JeffH mentioned the same before. This side-flexing issue is why I would not recommend extracting flow frames out of the box, in the box they fit snuggly together and support each other, it is one rigid block. That might also explain why some people had major flooding issues when extraction off the hive…
Small Hive Beetle (SHB) @JeffH. I do believe it to be counterproductive to take the flow frames off for extraction because of SHB. Opening a hive too often, especially during hot weather will increase the number of beetle, every inspection creates mayhem within the hives and the bees neglect their SHB chasing duties for quite some time because they are busy elsewhere. So, if I have minimal interference during honey harvest (as intended by the flow system), the better the bees can deal with SHB. I do live close enough to the coast to be in a major SHB area, I know of other beekeepers close to me who got slimed out, I don’t use traps or chemicals for control and usually might see 2 to 3 SHB during a full-blown inspection, that isn’t to bad:)
Cheers and happy beekeeping to everyone

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Yes, and the excess build up overflows down into the hive. Me thinks anyway.:innocent:

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Thanks for that. I found it really interesting.
Your extensive record keeping puts you into the “professional” category for mine.
How easily we can forget season to season without good recording.

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Thanks for sharing Georgina, I think you are well and truly off your P’s too. :+1:

Thanks for your extraordinarily detailed post. Learned a lot from it. I was confused why people (that don’t even use Flow Hives, it seems) suggest harvesting flow frames outside the hive. Commercial beekeepers have a very different view on Flow Hives I’m learning.

I’m looking forward to harvest my first flow hive honey, in situ, using your method as described, and watch out for any leaks.

I was also thinking about starting to keep records of my inspections - I don’t like mobile apps, and prefer an old fashioned notebook. Are there any particular things that you note apart from leaks… and general condition of bees and hive?

Hi @Georgina, Thank you so much for taking all that time and effort.m with your incredibly detailed response about harvesting and the SHB. I will definitely give harvesting with two keys a go!

You are all an incredibly knowledgeable and kind bunch of people to share your experiences and expertise in such detail with novices like me. Thank you all so much. I love reading each and every one of your responses.

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