No negative comments on my set up, you all have hammered me on it before -
I have it all sorted!!!
I have had platforms custom made for extracting!
Hi Busso, many thanks.
Using two brood boxes will certainly reduce the risk of the queen wanting to venture up above it. If the bees are not preparing cells for her to lay in, she may not want to go there.
If the queen however does finish up above the QX, she’ll certainly lay eggs up there & as many as the bees prepare cells for her to lay in.
The drones wont just die up there, well they do die trying to get through the QX, by the hundreds. If the hole in the crown board is open, hundreds will finish up in the roof as well as hundreds try to exit via the QX. A small top entrance will solve that, ONLY if you know there is brood in the flow frames. If you don’t want to know, you’d need to leave a permanent top exit.
In my case, whenever I found brood in honey frames, I simply wouldn’t extract honey from those frames until all the bees have emerged.
Hive beetles completely change everything in relation to brood in the flow frames.
Without hive beetles: no problems except for maybe some brood juice in the honey, which wouldn’t really matter.
With hive beetles: brood in flow frames is a recipe for disaster.
You would have to see & smell a slime-out before you can really appreciate where I’m coming from. Once you’ve had a slime-out or seen or smelt one, you’d do everything in your power to avoid it ever happening again.
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Congrats on your first extraction.
However, I’d like to make the following comments for others learning…
If the photos were posted in the opening post, my advice would have been to hold off the extraction. I misinterpreted ‘end frame’ as ‘outside’ frames which in your case are almost empty.
Also the adjacent frames and cells facing the ‘extracted frame’ don’t look capped enough to suggest the middle frame was 90% capped. Typically bees fill and cap out from the centre. The quantity extracted and the flooding also confirms this.
Each frame should yield 2.5-3kg of honey. So that’s potentially 0.5-1kg of honey that could have drowned the brood or queen and a lot of honey to clean up for any colony. (Hopefully this is not the case).
All the best for future extractions. It’s all a learning experience for us all.
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No idea what that top photo is?? Or where it came from!
The bottom photo was 4 weeks BEFORE!
For some reason unknown at this time the frames seem to leak a bit the first extraction.
Mine did but have not leaked on subsequent extractions.
2 to 2.8 Kg per frame is about right.
Did you check for % water.
If you don’t have a refractometer I urge you to get one especially made for honey.
In the mean time watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh5-LAKL2lw as this is surprisingly accurate.
Won’t give you a % but it will tell you if its ripe.
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Hi. Yes I’ve ordered a refractometre, just waiting for it
I think it’s a big learning experience. I’m happy with what we did. Yes we have made some mistakes but I’m sure it will get them sorted.
The bees seem happy & filling up the hive with honey & bees.
In around 5 weeks we have gone from not having a bee in the flow hive to having lots as well as capped honey
I going to concentrate on what we are doing right and continue on.
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This is dependant on the strength of the hive…and the reverse is true of strong colonies in our part of the world (Canada). The photo below shows the center frames are the last to be capped…half-moon shape bottom center of frame. The end frames are totally capped. This FH super has just been drained.
Our latest honeyflow is also our heaviest…we don’t want the bees to run out of room for nectar storage…so the honey has been drained from the flowhives beforehand and the bees are desparate to fill those wet FH supers again.
JeffH says to beware of this technique in certain areas of Australia as it attracts hive beetles…thank God we don’t have them here in Canada.
Our hives are at peak population now and contrary to intuition, they fill the hive often from top to bottom…the area immediately above the queen excluder is the last to fill in most cases.
When reading this keep in mind our hives are inside beehouses with through-the-wall entrances…so the bees react differently…perhaps like they would react as a wild swarm in a warm attic. Notice the total lack of aggression…very seldom are we are attacked inside the buildings…they are so calm.
For those of you who have seen some of these videos before, I hope you can put up with the repetition. There seems to be quite a few new posters…perhaps they may be interested but don’t know where to navigate on this forum to access them.
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Thanks for your update Doug, I have 8 frame brood boxes with Flow Supers on some of the hives and here regardless if it a Flow Hive Super or a convention Langstroth super my bees leave an ark in the center frames above the QX till it is the last of the empty cells and then get used for stores. It seems the bees haven’t figured out the QX stops the queen laying eggs in the super.
Cheers
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That’s all that really matters. The FlowHive was made to make things easy so we should not complicate it.
Bit like the other oaths…first do no harm to bees. Then its a matter of judgement. I am quite confident now in my calls on when to extract without the difficult task (compared to standard Lang frames) of lifting every frame to see the amount of capping. If in the future, I do make an error and extract some unripe… so be it. I do not have hives to make money …just be self sufficient in honey.
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My thoughts exactly…and you must have some strong hives!
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The Hives were going great even given they have been in drought conditions for nearly a year but the bush fires have knocked them about badly. 30% of their foraging area in the natural bush has gone up in flames. The closest the fires go to my hives was 200 yards away but I’m laughing, I haven’t lost a hive. 90% of Australia is now a declared drought area, not in my wildest dreams did I think that could happen but area that have never been know to burn have gone up in smoke.
Cheers
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