This thread is just for anyone who has a flow hive and the bees didn’t fill it up with honey as fast as you hoped. I have flow hives and standard hives. This year in my hills apiary I have some standard hives with supers on them: and to date the bees havn’t put any honey into the supers- even though the colonies are large and very active. The simple answer is that they don’t have a surplus. This can happen with flow frames and standard frames. When the bees are strong enough- and they have a surplus- they will fill the supers- whether they be flow or standard… so Don’t Worry- and Carry On.
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Both of my flow hives are filling up the flow super but in a slower pace than last year. One of my strong hive spreads out 5 frames with some capped honey from the center in 2 weeks while the other weaker flow hive has 3 frames uncapped nectars. I added the flow supers abit early this season in early Sept but they only did cleaning and waxing up until early October.
That’s it- last season our records indicated that we got a lot less honey over summer and autumn than the previous year. This year my mothers hive is filling rapidly- whilst my own hives at a very different location are doing well but have yet to store any honey in the supers: flow or standard. It’s a seasonal game beekeeping- and whether the bees fill a super has a lot more to do with the local conditions and the state of the colony than the type of super used.
I just posted this thread for people who are new to beekeeping and are disappointed when their flow super doesn’t immediately fill with gorgeous honey. Good things come to those who wait (or are lucky).
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