When is the best time of day to extract honey?

I like to harvest during the hottest part of the day so the honey is more viscous.
As others have mentioned open in sections, ensure there is always an air gap at the top of the extraction tube and if it is not on a Flow base, there is a backward sloping angle. If possible use two keys to crack the frame. If draining into a sealed bucket ensure there is somewhere for the air to escape.
I leave the frames on the hive and visually check the cells are capped. (I couldn’t quite trust shaking a 3kg segmented frame.)
As it seems important to stress the occasional flooding issues by some, from my experience I have not had flooding issues in multiple extractions using the above guidelines. and will be doing an extraction off the hive in multiple ways as an experiment, just looking for the GoPro to charge. :wink:
Good luck.

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Thanks for the information and suggestions.
The flow frame in the e viewing window has appeared almost full but uncapped for a couple of weeks. I pulled one out of the middle the other day and it was mostly full but almost no capping either.
I have heard of the shake method but I am not willing to try that out of concern of the frame coming apart.
I started looking at refractor on Amazon. I see $80 and $20 versions that at look basically identical. Is there really a big quality or accuracy difference in these things?

Do bees ever just decide not to cap honey? I mean if their intent is to eat the current store before winter, why work to cap it. I have a mix of capped and uncapped honey in the top and bottom brood boxes as well and a large percentage of that is mostly uncapped too. Actually most all of the frames 9 in one and 10 in the other, are filled with uncapped honey and very little brood.

They seem to sometimes not cap it even though it can be ripe. It is tricky subject in a sense because there is the concern about honey and fermentation. If you are not experienced it is particularly tricky. If you are intending on doing anything other than eating the honey soon or freezing it and eating it yourself promptly after “thawing” , I would definitely get a refractometer to test the honey. My guess is it is ripe if it has been uncapped for a while, but I strongly suggest getting a refractometer. @Dawn_SD posted a link to one that looked fine some time back. I might be able to find the post shortly.

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Found it. Must make sure it is one for honey apparently. Just click on that link.

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I like to start a harvest around 11 am- and stagger it out over an entire day (cracking the frames around 25% at a time- and leaving for at least 30 minutes to drain before the next 25%)- and I also like to just harvest two frames at a time- and harvest the entire box over maybe a week. If you have the time and access- it’s a good way to go. Although it takes hours the work is absolutely minimal- just set a timer- and do something else between increments). Minimise the chances of disturbance from leaks- and you extract the most honey from the frames. If the honey is very thick you really can let them drain for hours- it just continues to drip, drip, drip. To do this you want to have a bucket with extension tubes so the set up is bee proof and you can walk away. There are photos of that on the forum here and there…

If you came to the end of a season and had a box that that was not fully capped- I would use an escape board to clear the bees- and remove that box and harvest it inside - all frames at once. I place it over a large tray- at a more extreme angle than normal and crack all the frames. You can then put it back on the hive for a week for the bees to clean it up before storing over winter.

as for ripeness to some degree you can see just by looking and/or tasting touching. You can see by how it glistens and moves how thick it is. Fresh nectar looks different (watery) in the cells and it tasted different.

jeffH has a video somewhere of a simple test for ripeness.

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Hi Nick,

I have answered questions similar to this a few times recently. You can do a search in the top right-hand corner of the forum to find existing topics with the answers.

e.g.

image

The best way if you don’t have a refractometer is to go by cappings. If it isn’t fully capped, please just spend the $40 on a refractometer - it costs a lot less than a Flow super.

Late morning, but give yourself at least 4 hours to get every last drop.

Open in 20% sections, leave 5-20 minutes between sections and never let the Flow tube get full to the top. Most of the time the problem is an airlock in the Flow tube.

Please have a search through the forum for answers, and if you can’t find anything after a bit of looking, we’ll do our best to help :slight_smile:
Off to find a cocktail recipe for the weekend now. :blush: Hey @busso, got any chilled white? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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My first harvest this spring, had 6 completely full, completely capped flow frames. I also had an extra set of flow frames that I hadn’t added to another hive yet, so I thought it would be a great idea to just swap the full frames for the empty, and therefore harvest in the comfort of my kitchen. Turned out to be a bad idea. The harvest was a cinch, but the consequences to the temperament of my girls was hardly worth it! I’d successfully re-queened all 3 of my hives in March due to the aggressiveness that had been persistently worsening since last year, no doubt as a result of the high incidence of Africanization in this area. The girls had calmed significantly over the next month or so, and the ongoing problems had resolved - until I harvested! My hives are probably 50 yards from the house, and are blocked by a high wall, but for the next week and a half or so it was step-outside-at-your-own-risk! They eventually settled down and went back to their re-queened, docile behavior, but I will never try such a stunt again!

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Hey @mykey - sounds like you learned the hard way how the Flow is meant to make things easier at harvest time :upside_down_face: Just curious, is this extra set you mention a completely new one, unused by bees? And what did you do with the frames you emptied? Another advantage you’re missing in your procedure is that the bees will dive right back into the freshly empty cells and start resealing and refilling them. They’ll have to spend some time sealing up all the brand new cells on those other frames before storing any nectar, assuming they’re new.

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I hear you about harvesting in the comfy kitchen. Arizona must be HOT this time of year: I wouldn’t want to stand out in the heat for 2-4 hours either.
Did you use smoke? There are some hives and some manipulations where smoke is not needed but I always have it ready. Messing with their honey in a dearth is not a smoke-less operation for me.
I know you need to lift the frames out to verify ripeness and that could make them mad but you could do that the day before and then when they’ve calmed down, go out and turn the Flow key.

Glad you got some honey!

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The frames I used to replace the ones removed had been used last year - I have 3 flow hives, but only one hive was ready for a super at that time. The frames I emptied I was able to place on another hive a couple of weeks later. We’re having early monsoons here and I’m happy to report that when I checked yesterday, both Flow supers were full and ready to harvest - the TRADITIONAL way! The 3rd hive was a split at the beginning spring, and will probably not need a super this year.

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I did use smoke, but that didn’t seem to deter them this time. I forgot to relay the funny (in retrospect) situation that occurred because of the girls’ testiness. Next door neighbor’s son was getting ready to return to summer school at college the afternoon after I “stole” all of the honey, and was standing outside with his ONLY car key and keys to his new apartment in his hand. When the ladies decided to go on a rampage, the neighbor kid went into a panic, threw the keys in the air, and ran. Of course, the keys must have gone into a bush or who knows where, and although half the neighborhood was out looking (after the girls calmed down a bit) we never found the keys. Only cost me $125 for the locksmith to come out and make a new car key!

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Why are you harvesting a Flow super the traditional way? You mean spinning the frames? :thinking:

One more thought, did you open the whole frame in one go, or in smaller sections? If you opened the whole frame at once, they may have been upset by honey flooding down inside the hive. :blush:

“Why are you harvesting a Flow super the traditional way? You mean spinning the frames?”

No, I was referring to my original post where I swapped out the frames for empty ones and harvested in my kitchen - really made the ladies angry for about a week and a half. When I say traditional, I mean the traditional method of harvesting from flow frames. I’ve found that by opening the frames 1/4 at a time about every 15 or 20 minutes, you avoid dripping down into the hive.

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Why will opening all at once cause the honey to flow into the hive? I thought the bottom section was sealed and it would only run down to the bottom and come out of the end hole \ tube.

I finally had some capped honey in mine this year for the 1st time and harvested it yesterday! We did all kinds of things wrong with setup trying to improvise the proper height table to hold the jars and such since the nice setup that is mounted to the box Cedar shows in all his videos does not come with the flow hive kit, (hint…it would be great to include that). We ended up making a big mess in and out of the hive and had a huge cloud of bees all around us the whole time and trying to get into the jars. I opened the frames partially at intervals so leakage into the frame that way was not an issue. What caused most of the spillage was that I assumed the tubes and that tab would lock in but they really just sit in the notch…so the slightest bump when adding the next jar kept knocking the tubes off in domino fashion while the honey was flowing out and would spill down the front. Only one of the frames was mostly capped very full. Most of my frames had a lot of uncapped cells. They have been full for over a month as I check them and the one on the window end I could see it all. I have no idea why they would fill it and never cap it. They just walked around on it for weeks. I still like the whole concept but it is certainly nowhere near the peaceful graceful experience of the marketing videos! The time it took me to do it all and clean up best I could was way longer than what it takes other people I know to do traditional extraction. Maybe I’ll get faster next year with this experience.

Airlocks can cause back pressure. I have spent a lot of my life working in laboratories, so I have seen the results of this many times. You get an airlock when fluid reaches the top of a horizontal tube and the fluid is thick and emptying slowly. In the Flow hive, if the honey reaches the top of the drainage Flow tube, an airlock will form and the remaining honey draining can be forced back inside the hive, leaking through the honey drainage channel.

My experience is different. I have spent decades uncapping and spinning frames, and then clearing up the mess. If you have more than 4 or 5 hives, probably spinning is faster, depending on how you organize your time. For one or 2 hives, the Flow method is much faster and cleaner.

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An easy work-around for the problem you encountered knocking out the tubes would be to harvest into a large jar and decant into small ones later.
Also it sounds like you were harvesting from several frames at once - given that you had lots of uncapped honey, it may be wise to stagger your harvest over a couple of days just in case you experience leaking inside the hive due to the lack of capping. That might be less disruptive to the bees. As long as you learn from your mistakes you will have a better experience next time you harvest.

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I am sure it will be faster and cleaner for me next time now that I know about the drain tubes. Making them lock in place when used would be helpful though.

…I was harvesting 3 at a time because it was getting late and I also read once you start you cannot stop the flow. Is that correct?

Nick, I certainly have harvested part of a frame before - having opened the frame incrementally and letting that section drain completely (as much as possible) I was able to leave the rest of the frame intact for a future harvest. This was due to an interruption that meant I couldn’t finish the whole process that day. I’m pretty sure I have read that Stuart Anderson said it is no problem to do that also.

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It is sort of but… You can always just choose to open 25 or 50% of the frame and stop. If you do that, you can probably empty it in under an hour for 25%. You can do the rest the next day, or if it is later than that, check the frames again visually and decide when.

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