Hey Jeff, 2 years out of a plastic QX is about normal and I agree with Jack that they are not value for money. When I am down to the QX I fit one I have used a heat gun to clean the wax off and the waxed QX comes home to be cleaned up, doing that saves so much time than trying to clean them up with a scraper or hive tool.
With this cyclone off the coast it is a bit drafty, I reacon holding a frame up the wind would blow the bees off so no need for brushing them off.
Went out to the apiary to check on the girls and there is none flying at all. A day for fitting wax and wire into new frames.
Cheers
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Hi Peter, a bit drafty alright. I had to tie some of my sugar cane up & cut most of the foliage off some cassava plants I have growing.
I thought we were in for a day of rain. It was raining at first light. That was the only rain we got. Apparently there’s more coming.
I have 5 boxes of stickies to return after extracting yesterday. That was after 12 boxes on Sunday. I’ve been doing 1/2 the hives one week, then the other 1/2 the next week & so on. So yesterday was the other half done a few days earlier on account of the rain forecasted for the weekend.
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Just an update, 5 days later.
I went there to swap my boxes for his boxes as well as check on the progress & health of the colony.
Remarkably, the 8 frames with fresh foundation were fully drawn with uncapped honey arcs above where the queen is to lay, however no eggs visible yet. We spotted the beautiful looking queen.
The 3 brood frames I left them with were completely empty of brood for some reason. Maybe some beetles slimed on them while the bees were bearding outside, then later on the bees cleaned all the brood out ready for a fresh start.
I know one frame, the one I added had lots of young larvae in it 5 days ago.
In regards to the 6 flow frames: one had been cleaned. The other 5 were laying face down on a table. As I suspected the under sides were completely slimed with lots of beetle larvae crawling in & out of the cells. With these photos, Wilma even captured a white tail spider. However I’m not sure if it’s actually a White Tail Spider.
Edit: Definitely not a White Tail Spider.
I have to caution the owner about not letting the larvae make it to ground. That will only create more beetles.
cheers
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Oh its definately a white tailed spider alright just not THE white tailed spider.
Glad we dont have beetles.
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Are you saying the beekeeper left them out to get slimed? Too big a job?
They were partially slimed 6 days ago with new beetle eggs. Now they are fully slimed with larvae on the faces down on the table. The outer faces are dry without any larvae.
The owner was very time poor yesterday & unable to talk much. However he told us the frames are easy to clean if you just take your time. I phoned him later to warn him not to allow the larvae to reach the ground, he didn’t answer the phone. I left a message with no reply yet.
He has a lot on his mind with running a business etc. He doesn’t seem able to take on board any of my advice, or the seriousness of the matter.
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Mate, you can only tell a person how it is, if that advice goes over their head and ignored then I would leave them to their own devices. There are so many people who do appreciate your help on this forum and living about us.
Off topic. I did a swarm removal last weekend, actually it was a wild colony, and was living in a bunch of bananas which had been bagged and still on the tree. The only issue was the wind till I got the bunch down on the ground. I was able to rubber band the brood and stores into frames and positive I got the queen as well, a big parade of bees going into the entrance of the box. I’ll give them a week to settle in and do a check on this very calm colony.
I hope this is the end of the Summer heatwave and high humidity.
Cheers
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Thank you Pete. I try to get them to be able to help themselves (him AND his brother) rather than call on me every time they have problems. I should have an $88 call-out fee like the washing machine repair man.
Yesterday he was briefly looking for the queen on the first frame I pulled out. Six days ago he was looking for her the whole time, pointing to every drone, asking if that’s the queen. Yesterday when Wilma & I did find her, he was too busy talking to someone to come & take a look.
He has a sense of humor because yesterday he pointed to a drone & asked “is that a drone”.
Well done on picking up the bunch of banana colony. Did you get any bananas as well?
You should charge a call out fee even if only a token charge. Other wise it is too easy for them to phone and not think things through.
The bananas in the colony bag had over ripened from the heat of the colony and the guy wasn’t about to pull/cut the bunch down, a wise move, it was a 2 person job to lower it down to the ground but in gratitude we both got a bunch each. That sort of put the story of bananas making bees nasty to rest, the smell of the bananas in a plastic bag was really strong but the bees were happy and calm. The guy was really happy we came to take the bees away, a great result for us both.
Cheers
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We found the same thing ourselves about bees being calm near ripe bananas as Wilma & I removed bees from a bunch of bananas a few years ago.
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Hi Jeff. I haven’t been on the forum for ages. The Flow Hive Webclan was discussing was one I looked after at the Mullumbimby Community Gardens. When we tapped the frames we would sometimes give newbies an opportunity to open and close the Flow Frames. It must have been on one of these occasions that the frames weren’t properly closed. SHB got into the open frames and the bees propylised/ waxed/ gummed the spaces.
Here’s how we solved the problem. First we drained honey from the affected frames through a fine mesh. There were a few SHB larvae but the honey tasted OK. Then I wrapped the frames in plastic and put them in the freezer for two days. After that the wrapped up frames sat on my back deck for a very long while while I pondered what to do. The back movable segment of both frames was jammed in position and wouldn’t move when the key was turned. I had some spare Flow Frames of my own so the Flow Hive was back in use almost straight away.
I thought the jammed frames were probably damaged and I would need to replace them but everything was all waxed up and I really didn’t want to dismantle them and I didn’t know how to clean them.
Then Zöe, one of our generous members gave me a Flow frame with black mould in it. The mould had appeared soon after she obtained it and had been replaced under warranty. She hadn’t been required to return the mouldy Flow Frame so it was something I could experiment with. I used a 2L hand pumped pressure sprayer and washed the Flow Frame with hot soapy water, then again with even hotter soapy water and finally with very hot, but not boiling, soapy water. 80C is the max recommended wash temp and the hottest water I used would have been at about that temp. It was certainly hot enough to clean off the wax but it didn’t remove all the mould from inside the drain channel. I needed to dismantle the frame by unwinding the tension cables.
That’s what I did and I was able to thoroughly clean the mould from between the segments. Reassembling the Flow Frame was tricky but I had kept most of the bits intact when I disassembled the unit. Can’t remember how long it took but probably less than an hour.
I cleaned out the original jammed Flow Frames the same way, expecting I would need to sacrifice one of them to replace the damage. However I was wrong about the damage. Once cleaned, the frames worked perfectly. They went back into their original places and the spares went into one of my large nuc boxes. (These hold 4 flow frames or 6 langs. I find them easier to handle than 8 frame boxes.)
These days if I let someone else use the key, I supervise their work more closely.
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G’day, it’s great to see you back. I’ll bookmark this post & show it to any flow hive owners that finish up with similar problems.
It’s not something I want to get involved with myself.
With respect: I would not eat honey after straining SHB larvae out of it. There’s a lot to be said for inspecting flow frames before harvesting the honey.
Cheers Bob.
I admit to tasting it Jeff but I wouldn’t eat it either. All my own Flow Frame honey goes through the fine strainer too and generally all there is to see are bits of wax and the occasional fragment of bee exoskeleton.
I’ve done a very small edit on my earlier post giving a bit more detail on how I used the hot water to clean the frames. I used one of those cheap, hand pumped 2L pressure sprayers with the nozzle turned to a water pistol type jet. I angled the jet downwards and into the Flow Frame cavities and swept the jet horizontally, backwards and forwards, Working down from the top of the frame.
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Just an update 10 weeks later. Just to recap: I left his hive with the brood box full of new fully drawn comb that the bees beautifully built the previous 5 days. I put his flow super on with 7 more frames with fresh foundation, plus one foundationless frame. I waited for him to get a new QX, plus clean the flow frames. He didn’t return my calls.
Last week he phoned because his QX arrived, plus he has to move the hive to his new property in a weeks time, plus he looked through the viewing window to find the trays (frames) that should normally be in the bottom box, in the top box. He had no idea that both boxes were full of frames. I didn’t understand what he meant over the phone until after I pulled 3 or 4 frames out of the top box. He was surprised when I told him that the bottom box also contained frames. I was surprised, not to mention amused to learn that he thought the bottom box had no frames in it.
Anyway it all went well. His hive is back to normal, full of bees. 5 of the brood frames that I left were classic beautiful frames of brood, flanked by 3 fully drawn frames of worker comb. I didn’t look at the flow frames as I returned them. The important thing was that I put them back in the right order, 1 to 6.
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Hi @Chava, to make it easy for you, this is where the ordeal started. The owner phoning me to offer me free bees. Click on the comment I replied to.