after I emptied the outer frames recently, I thought that I wouldn’t be getting any more honey this season being in the second month of Autumn with winter coming up soon…
but after seeing the outer frames filling up fast, again, I thought that I had better check the inner 4 frames…
THEY WERE FULL…
so I emptied them out to make more room for the honey that is till coming in…
my standard beehive has been a dud this year… I got a frame out of it early and that was it… no more :
if it weren’t for the fowhive it would have been a very disappointing honey season… I’m blown away with this thing… I love it… the bees love it…
Hi Andrew do you plan leaving the flow frames on through winter? If so, could there be a problem with honey going hard in the flow frames, or does it stay runny all year? cheers Tim.
hmm, I don’t think so… I’m a little obsessed with watching the bees you see…
they come an go all day long along the river below my home… I watch them through the dining room window when I’m not at work… I watch them at the hive and they come in up over the fence and into the hive… when they leave they’ll go up over the fence… sometimes doing a circle or two to memorise their hive area…
my standard hive I have split the top and bottom box… they cross over into each others box… they have virtually nothing in the supers… I have now pulled the queen excluder to see what happens
in Australia we usually “pack down” into the bottom box…
and this is where the concentration of bees are… I have pulled the queen excluder so will see what happens over the next month… plenty of honey in bottom boxes…
at this stage I have no plans in pulling the Super off…
why would I? this is THEIR winter stores and they will draw on them throughout winter and most likely empty them themselves anyways…
so unless the bees pack down into the bottom box and I start having trouble with hive beetle of other pests in the top box, i’m going to leave the super on…
that way come spring, or before, they can expand, at will, when it suits them…
keep in mind that every time you swap boxes in and out, you break the bees seal that keeps the pests out…
I asked only because if you have the same type of bee in adjacent hives and there is a real disparity between them that is usually the reason and you need to do something about it before you winter them.
Lovely honey from the flow frames though. Well done
Hi Andrew, I think I read earlier that your standard hive swarmed twice. That wouldn’t be helping it’s performance one bit. You may have issues with it that might need some attention.
It’s hard to compare one type of hive against another type of hive if one of the hives has issues that needs attending to.
12.4kg, and I think Andrew said that his bucket and tubes weigh about 600g. His first post in this thread implies that was from 4 frames - so almost 3kg per frame, or about 7 lb honey per frame. Pretty amazing!
You guys in the States need to ‘move with the times’ and go metric. Crikey, we did that back in '66 or so. Things would be so much easier for us all if you did and neither would have headaches
I wish we would but God I would not love relearning all that stuff on the fly as an adult. Luckily I have a few hobbies which force me to convert on a fairly regular basis so I can guesstimate how much a measurement is in metric by eye but it is far from precise.
