When is the best time of day to extract honey?

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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