We received our Flow Super Lift yesterday. The weight-bearing screws went in straight away. Then today dawned bright and sunny and we haven’t looked in to either of our two hives for a couple of weeks. So away we go with the Super Lift.
Check the video:-
A couple of points to mention. Make sure that other screws you may have slightly unscrewed to take the brackets aren’t in the way as the lifter brackets take up space up and down the sides of the hive and need to clamp in close. You’ll see in the video how I had to fix that problem on the second (grey) hive.
Another is I have always operated from the rear of the hives and have had to transition to working from the side. New for me and funny how we get set in our ways. One way around this is to have the super tilt forward instead of backwards. Unfortunately, we have the Flow weather guards on the front and they use the same area that the lifter needs, so they’d need to be removed before we could tilt the super forwards.
All in all, these are minor points when the main reason for the Lifter is to minimise the effort needed to lift a full Flow super off the brood box, and it does that very well.
Cheers
It’s recomended that the support pole stands at a 90 degree angle. However thanks for posting the video as it has shown me that the support pole is longer than I anticipated which is good.
Hi Martha, you are right about the 90 degrees. I was also mildly chastised by the Flow people. In my defence I had watched a video by Fred Dunn.
I was also worried about the leg length and happy it was long enough for my tabletop setup.
Cheers
It was a great video! Thanks for taking that in the spirit in which it was given. It’s the little things that can be disasterous. I quit using the frame hive beetle traps because I kept spilling oil in my hive shifting the boxes around to do an inspection. The leg length was what I was worried about too because my hives are on 2 cinder blocks to keep the rain from splashing on ground then up into the hives. So I took one cinder block level off as I saw from your video what to expect visually. Yours is elevated as well though I’ll be running 2 brood boxes on mine. Happy bee keeping.
Make sure those screws you’ve slightly loosened aren’t in the way of the lifter brackets. They take up space and need to clamp in tightly for the best fit.
