Don't buy a Flow Hive until you've seen this!

this is Phil Chandler and I'm standing here beside as you may have gathered a flow hive and a flow hive is really just an adaptation to a standard beehive this is a standard length cross brood box down the bottom here and this is a similar size and shaped box that contains the special flow hive gadget and if I open it you'll better see what I mean and this bit comes off well should come off as bees already coming out okay so now you can see where the bees are there's a queen excluder right here so only the worker bees can get up into this part of the hive and what they are doing or should be doing is putting honey away in these chambers in the cells into in these boxes here and we're going to talk a little bit about how this works so you can see because we're effectively looking at the end of what is transparent plastic honeycomb and so you can see right here there's some cells that have actually got honey in them they're already full of honey and there are some there are quite a few that haven't got honey in there empty but further back in there that the chances are there's quite a lot of honey what we don't know is whether or not it's capped now because of the construction of this there's this bog we can't see whether individual combs are capped or not what we can do is open the window at the side here and we can see whether or not the end comb is camp because the end comb is usually the last one to be capped now we can tell looking through that window that that comb is not in fact capped so we can deduce from that well what can we say we know that that one isn't capped we don't know anything about the central combs it could be that they've already been capital they're still waiting to recount we don't know yet so I'm gonna pull that window back so now to decide whether we're going to be able to extract honey from one of these one or more of these we're going to have to go actually go in the normal way down through the roof so I'm going to put this on because we don't know how the bees are going to react to this so we'll just stung me through this shirt I'm gonna put my glasses on because who knows what I may have to look at right so we good someone take the roof off so I'm just going to pop the lid this colony has been in here for two years they've had no treatments last year they didn't really put very much honey in in the in the super at all but then we didn't get much honey at all last year anyway so here are our cones so what we're trying to find out is is there honey in these artificial cones now that we're going to have to be quite careful how we get these out because they are it looks like they're well glued in with propolis and I'm also I'm being very careful because I don't want to break anything being plastic this stuff is it's reasonably tough but it's also quite brittle these individual combs I keep calling them combs for want of a better word really but they are effectively artificial plastic honeycomb so I think that's a reasonable word to use I'm going to attempt to leave out one of these here in the middle think I can feel it's moving there's a certain amount of brace combing going on here so these are getting a bit exciting I'm just gonna give them a little bit of water to cool them down right this is now free so I can now lift the this is a stainless steel cable that's holding the holding the whole structure together you'll see what I mean in a minute there's another one at the bottom I'm just struggling a bit with the propolis on here there we get okay it's free now so I'm gonna lift this up and you can see that in fact the central the central comb does appear to be 90% capped and this is a first for us this is the third year we've been running these and this is the first time we've had a really quite well capped comb now there are places on it that aren't cap there's there's there's a group of bees down here some of whom have heads in their cells and there's another group up here some of whom have heads in cells now the way this works is that if I can turn it around slightly like this there is I'm gonna rest I'm gonna rest the comb back just back in its slot like that so I can let go of it right but this this is the this is the flow hive key it's a long l-shaped well screwdriver if you like that's the shape anyway and the way that these things work is that you insert this key into a hole into a slot which I am exposing now that little thing comes out the the the screwdriver thing goes into this slot here all the way down to the end and then it gets turned through I think ninety-two yes obviously ninety degrees that what that does that the structure here is that these are strips of plastic arranged vertically held together by these stainless steel wires one at the top one at the bottom and when you turn this lever what's going to happen is that half of these plastic strips are going to move by the distance of approximately half of a cell height so in other words about I guess about three millimeters tune are three millimeters something like that and that is going to create a because the cells are angled towards the center as all honeycomb is that's going to create a cascade effect by which the honey is going to run down inside into this trough at the bottom and then we would insert this plastic what would you call it spigot into the hole I forget which way around it goes now probably that way we would insert that into the hole and then the honey would run out of here into whatever container we have ready to take it now the problem we have of course there there are several possible problems with that one is that if you have honey that is set in other words something like all seed rape or or even worse IV honey in in here then it's not going to turn into a liquid in fact even even Heather honey which is thixotropic in other words it's more of a jelly than a liquid it's going to have honey is going to have trouble running down inside here into the bottom of the into the bottom trough so only certain honey's are going to work now this is the honey that we've got in there is in fact liquid I can see that quite it's quite obvious that it's a liquid because if I just do that you can actually see the liquid as it exposed so this is a you know this is a typical Devon wildflower honey and it would be possible to extract this frame by the standard flow hive technique of turning this tap and tapping it off the bottom now of course the problem with it is that if we do that we are going to most likely going to injure quite a large number of bees because there are lots of bees here with heads in cells now this is the well it's one of the two central combs so if anything's going to be capped in here it'll be these two central combs this is only as I said about 90 percent capped we've got a number of bees that are still working on these and therefore we do not want to turn this key and risk injuring a bunch of bees as well as potentially polluting the honey with you know bits of B so there's this is one of the the if you like the weaknesses of the system is that you need to be sure that your frames are properly capped before you extract and the only way of knowing that for certain is to actually lift them out and have a look so you know that's something you have to bear in mind with one of these hives now as it stands it's now early September and we would normally around here expect the ivy to start producing nectar any time now so once Ivy gets into the cells of a comb it will set very very quickly like within days and it sets really hard it sets like well I described as black ball rock but some of you won't know what Blackpool Rock is but it's a very hard sugary sweet so and once that's happened of course there's no possible way you're ever going to get it out of here without applying heat in some form which obviously we would like to avoid doing so we've got it we've got a dilemma now we have to make a decision because if we leave this as it is yes they're they're going to complete these cells yes they're going to put nectar in there some of it may be ivy and okay if it's only that amount of ivy and if we catch it quickly we might get away with it however the outer frames and we we know this one isn't capped because we can see it from the outside we don't know this about this one we assume this one is probably similar to this one but we've got at least two and possibly as many as four frames in here that we don't know the state of and so we can't just arbitrarily stick the lever in there and turn it and hope for the best because you know that could end up with a lot of carnage frankly so and we don't want to leave empty base in these combs because if we do that it's going to get clogged up with ivy honey and we're never gonna get it out so we have a we've got a little problem to solve here now one one way around this one possible solution to this would be to take away these combs that are mostly capped brush the bees off them and extract them by by the the normal flow method if you like but away from the hive yeah but that's something we could do and that's probably what we will do with these two central combs the other two combs well we could also do that with of course but we want to make sure this colony has got enough food for winter although the ivy is about to start we assume we can't guarantee that that's going to produce a good yield and the problem of course with ivy is because it's quite a hard honey it doesn't make life a bit difficult for the bees overwinter so we come up with a possible kind of halfway house solution and that it goes as follows what we're going to do is probably we'll take these two central combs out we'll brush the bees off and we'll extract them away from the hive the rest of the hutt the combs we're gonna put underneath this box we're going to actually swap these two boxes over so we're going to put the the the box with the flow frames underneath the brood box with a queen excluder on top of it and that will cause the bees to well least their instinct will be to move the food from their bottom box as it will be now into the into the top box and in fact we're going to add we've got a super ready over here which we're going to put on top and so what we hope will happen is that the bees will themselves move the honey from these other frames into the super above the brood box the Queen excluder will stop the Queen going down into the fruit into the flu but I'm laying eggs which is obviously something we don't want and and also because there is storage space now above them that will discourage the bees from storing ivy in the bottom box so so that's the that's the current plan so our first job is to remove the capped honey from there and so we're going to use a high-tech B brush which is made up of a bunch of grass and so I'm going to lift this carefully from the center and I'm going to rush the bees off this comb getting snowed out stung in the process but okay so we've got most of the bees off we'll get these off this side so I can take that away now put it over there and the the remaining bees hopefully it will find their way off it these bees are a little bit on the sticky side so I'm actually going to put some gloves on for the next bit okay so put the gloves on I'm going to take the next one out if you have a flow hive or thinking of buying a flow hive don't be necessarily put off by this I think they are I think they have their their uses I think they have there are places where they work well but you don't want to be near any oilseed rape you don't want to be near ivy and you don't want to be near Heather really to make these things work I think so here we go with this one so again you know ninety percent capped be still working on it and so we're going to brush bees off that and get a lot of them off just by shaking I'll take that over there okay so the next combs we do want to make sure that these have enough honey for winter I'm not a big fan of taking all the bees honey and feeding them sugar I've never done that routinely so I would say what's that's about what 75% capped maybe bees are still working on it so we're going to let them have those four give them a bit of space speed up the process of them removing the honey from these frames what I'm going to do is just score the surface like this with my IO tool that's going to expose honey to the to the air and to the bees of course and whoop someone can move mindful to be there what it does is makes it easier for them to get the honey out of these cells it also encourages them to do so because they hate having honey exposed to the air if I put that on the wrong way around I have overnight and it doesn't matter too much but I will put it the right way around it's virtually nothing capped there girl these things are well in trying not to injure bees but right so I'm gonna close that box temporarily and the faceplate is here and there's another piece [Music] so what I'm going to do is take that top box so I've put it on the stand take the bottom box off put it on the stand clean the floor a bit put the what was the top box back on the bottom then put the cream screws around then put the brood box back on top of that and then put the super' on top of everything else and I'm going to have to do a little bit of improvisation because the super is actually made for the slightly wider version of the Langstroth than the one we've got here so all right okay so let's do it kind of wishing I put a proper suit on you may laugh yeah you may laugh I'm going to put a suit on right this is Phil Chandler properly dressed this time so what we're going to do is put that on top of there so [Music] it we might get away with this actually there's just I'll double-check but there's just the thickness of the wood I think just accommodates the the one underneath so what we've done so far we've put a super on here on top of the brood box and then this is going to go on top of that in a minute but the idea of this is that this is at all empty is all drawn combed so with any luck they'll take the honey from the flow super and transport it up through the roof up into this one that's what we're hoping obviously you know these do their own thing have their own ideas but that's the plan smash floor that is what is [Music] [Music] [Music] cause it affects a laceration driver coming up with apologies to any days that I then squashed [Music] [Music] [Music] once upon a time this box had cast elations in it but they've mostly we may have to put a thin strip of something-or-other down the edges here just to make sure no whoop scan climb in or any other wannabes so of course this crown ball is going to be slightly too small now [Music] what I think by wall zoo in practice to put a piece of reflectix as a complete cover to this super and then put that on top of it to hold it down actually that's probably good enough is enough okay so to summarize what we've done here we've taken two frames out of the flow which have now got B's all over them again of course but we'll deal with that in a minute we're going to extract the honey from those we've left four frames in the bottom here space them out a bit we've scored them to expose the honey and what we're hoping that is now going to happen is that the bees are going to take the honey from this box into the brood box and also into this soup around here which isn't under sort of the roof that way they'll store the honey in the place where they want it overwinter there's no restriction on them going between here and here there's no queen excluder up here the queen excluder is down here to stop the Queen laying in the flow part in the flow cones for want of a better word because that we definitely don't want that to be happening so we want the Queen to lay in this box and it doesn't matter if she sprays up and lays in this box a bit we definitely don't want remain down brain says she's not no one even want to lay these workers in that but we don't want her laying anything that will be removable so over winter they're going to be on effectively brooding the hearth they're gonna be on this box and this box though there will be honey in here they'll be even more humming up there they should be fine for the winter the flow hive well what can we say it worked reasonably well this year go over and have a look at these again we can see that they've they've put away quite a decent amount of honey in these frames and we can extract that we can dust the bees off here we can extract this as would be done you know inside a flow hive normally without removing these but you know you know you understand I hope the reasons why we had to take these out so that's about it for this session and we will video our extraction process as well I hope mr. Phil Chandler and I'm standing here beside a float up that flute eyes [Laughter]

Channel: Phil Chandler: Barefoot Beekeeper

Views: 601,939

Rating: 3.7072136 out of 5

Keywords: bees, honeybees, beekeeping, bee keeping, natural beekeeping, phil chandler, Flow hive, beekeeping in devon, balanced beekeeping

Id: ZC839GxDUqk

Length: 28min 42sec (1722 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 12 2019