Inspecting Flow Frames - Flow Hive 🍯🐝 [LIVE]

we've got a few great questions coming through this is the time of week we get on Facebook live and and do a broadcast to answer your questions so one of the questions we had was was can you show us and the inspection of the flow frames so that's what we're going to do today you've got other ideas of what you like just to see we're here to help you get started in beekeeping and with your flow hives so so put them in the comments below if you'd like to see something in particular today we're going to do an inspection I've already given them three good posture spike in the entrance it's good to wait a couple of minutes after you do that that helps come the bees down so these frames have been in here for quite a while and and they've been stifled in harvest at many times and you can see the different colors here that's it that's a fresh one coming in with the world quince honey this is the the earlier earlier stuff that has smaller hateful and flavors in it here and it's a beautiful thing to be able to isolate the flavors like that to share and enjoy so to inspect the hive first of all you give the I hope some smoke wait a couple of minutes put your your base it on to remember safety would be some people have severe allergic reactions favorite some much preferred jacket than the pants these days because it's just simple to pull on and off so take your lead off then you've got the inner cover yeah to to prise the inner cover off you'll need your hive tool that comes with their suit jacket or a full suit and what you want to do is just pry under the edge here if you are new to beekeeping wear your gloves as well until you really get to know beekeeping end and your hive so I'm just lifting that off now you can see the bees have started to get a bit carried away so you put comb on the inside of the inner cover that's pretty normal we try to space it so you get less of that but they still do sometimes you can see your hive beetle running around here squash any of those she says sorry about that fatal you didn't mean to leave being the wrong place but it's best to have lesser bows in your heart back into the home so here we are this is the flow frames now you can see these have been in here for a while we haven't taken them out for a bit and they've started to put a bit of Berk home in between some bees will do more of that and some bees won't depends a bit on the genetics of your hive so to get a frame out first of all you can just break the book I'm with your hive tool doesn't make it nice and clean so you don't end up with Birk I'm scratching the flow frame service on the way out so I'm just being careful trying not to damage any bees as I do this we've got a couple of interested ones and I'm just cutting that Burkham away saying here and we get a bunch of bees that are in your way of working you can just give them a little bit of smoke like that and they'll generally run away what except for now because it looks like they can't quite get yeah we go tire hitting up now and that gives you access to that area I'm just sliding the hive tool down and cutting together okay next thing to do is just cut that bit away - here we go okay next thing to do is they come out just about like regular frames at this end with the J tall coming into the end like that before you do that just going to loosen up the other end now if there's been in there for a while like these frames have the bees would have really stuck them down to the excluder so there's two lift points at this end one is under here and we've just made enough for him to get your hive tool under there and then you can just lift it a little bit like that there's another little point here right under the bottom of the frame your hive tool fits perfectly like that to give it a little lift there then the other end comes out like a regular frame and grab onto that with your hand you have to enter the other end and then slowly and gently just pull that frame of honey yeah so the reason why I say slowly is that first frame you get out there's a lot of bees and you don't want to roll them we could add a little bit of smoke to that area to lessen the amount of bees in in between them because if there was a lot of B sometimes you can squash them just by rolling on each other so I've just added a little bit of smoke now to either side and the bees are scattering and see them climbing off the edge of the frame onto my hand try not to put the finger on Abby or it will sting you with your gloves if you're neither beekeeping so let's have a look at what's going on here so this frame it looks to me like they they filled it I ate some away in the in the in the early spring which is pretty pretty normal and then as their flowers have come on the field that area back in again so this frame is probably about 60% capped and it's almost there if you're harvested that you probably find the moisture content would still be acceptable similar on the other side look at that beautiful capping they're just closing in here there so that's when they've capped it so that's there they've decided that the moisture content is low enough in those cells to wax it over and keep it for later luckily they store so much so we can share some of their honey too and here's where they're still doing the final dewatering of the honey and its really a pretty thing as they close they kept in that's beautiful okay what I'm going to do is put that frame aside now now we have harvested a few of these frames recently so hopefully we'll get to see a variation I'm putting that down beside the hole on the ground and I've actually put it on the end because it was a lot of bees on the bottom I'm gonna go ahead and pull the next frame out the next frame will be a bit easier to pull out because you can now go sideways and not have to worry so much about rolling bees as you pull the frames out and going sideways helps directly there honey so I should be out of pretty easy leave that now and it's well clear of all of the other other frames so this one's completely capped on both sides and that's what a fret up low fame looks like minutes completely capped besides the same beautiful capping beautiful honey well done girls so that's a perfect example of a life I'm ready to harvest in the end he's showing you a similar thing here with all of those selves full of honey and from from the they've even got a little bit carried away and started to put wax on this viewing window if you wanted to you could clean that off just by running your tool down so that you get a little bit better view try not to dig into that laughing though so um let's see if we can get to a frame that were prepared we have this in about a week ago so Jenny's asking she says she hasn't been able to get any honey from her frames this spring is that normal as this time last year she had had an abundance of honey okay so she had an abundance he had an abundance of honey last season but this time not so much honey so there's a few factors involved the two factors are a lot of bees and a good nectar flow so one of those things must be must be out to not get a good harvest if you open the side windows of the hive and there's a lot of bees in there then it's probably the nectar flow isn't very strong there's not a lot of bees it could be your hives not very strong in which case you may need to take a look at your brood nest and see if the Queen's laying well and if not introduce a new one or you can just wait and the bees will supersede if they find she's not laying enough eggs but yet take a look around at what other hives are doing and if other hives are really bringing in a lot of honey in your area and yours is then your colony may need a bit of a bit of new genetics in order to to get that happy yeah please put any more questions below you know answer your questions also let us know what you would like to see next week I'm just going to pull out another frame here just by going sideways again Barry's curious as to why you didn't pull the end frame first as it may have been easier to remove with the flow frames it um doesn't make that much of a difference which one you move first certainly in the brood box that that is often the case because you've got a little bit of space on the edge to move as the flow frames have made nice and tight across here in order to create that end window we've tried to try to calculate it so you've got exactly the right amount of space on the edge so there actually isn't any wiggle room to move the Hopis over so any frame you choose has to come up straight and vertical so doesn't really matter which one you start with we got this next one coming up and what we have here there's another full frame of honey so this hive really is due for harvesting of course you don't need to have them you can leave it all there for the bees but while they're making a lot of honey it's an opportune moment to to fill up your jars and hopefully though they'll rebuild their frames again quite quickly it's amazing when it's a really good flow on you can have us all these frames in a few weeks later I'll be full again so if you don't have us then that's okay but you do miss out on honey that would have otherwise been refilled again look at that you're all wondering around of course we're above the excluded here so what you're looking at is all of the worker bees there's no drones and no queen up above the excluder in this hive you've got any questions put them in the comments below we'll keep answering them what we might do is put these frames back and go and actually doesn't have any any honey you know just so you can see what it looks like there's all of these frames I thought we might find some that were half full but they've been so quick to refill that they're all full again Judy says your bees are so calm I'd like to know what you use in your smoker or are they just calm what I use in my smoker is whatever is around so I just scraped up some leaves and some garden mulch and happened to be camp for laurel leaves which is a tree that's a bit of a weed around here but it's got a strong smell but it's nothing to do with that what's in the smoker could be a good idea to introduce a new queen of genetics Singh Kham of course there's different schools of thought on that some people like to keep more aggressive hives and believe there's benefits to that and it really just depends if I've got a really nicely producing hive that's a bit cranky I'll often keep it for as long as I can bear that the crankiness because they're doing a great load of production and if they're producing well and your hives really healthy then you don't have to inspect your flow frames try to harvest so you can just keep harvesting now um we don't have the varroa mites here in this country so we don't have to inspect these some people like to inspect their flow frames off from prior to harvest that's not what my dad and I designed them before we designed them so you didn't have to disable hive in order to have a spat it if you're if you need a baked evening in you the flow frames you might want to have a look and just gauge what the pattern looks like here and how that translates to what's going on in the hive look at the side windows the end window and have a have a look at the in the flow frames just to learn about about yes when it looks like that then it's mostly kept in here then it's good for harvest so as you go you'll find you will need to take it look less and less and playpens will be used what they're intended which is to to run harvest without opening night any more questions yeah Lindsay is asking why are there so many bees on a fully capped frame so there's so many bees because there's lots of bees in this hive and they need somewhere to be so when the frames are fully capped you're fine there will be a lot of bees in the hive that would be covered in these even though there's nothing really to do they'll just be hanging out there waiting for another another job and sometimes they will be ducking in that foraging but but for pollen and so on but if they've run out of space to store honey and I can't store anymore honey and that is one of the triggers that triggers them to to divide their hive in swarm so so if they don't have space to raise their brood off or put any honey and they might decide to to raise a new queen and split the colony so what I'm going to do more questions got a few bees just hanging on this frame I'm just gonna give it a little shake just so that I don't squash them as I'm putting this back in Kate's asking how often do you need to inspect so here in Australia commercial beekeepers often inspect the brood nest twice a year just to make sure it's happy and healthy the in other continents there's things like 400 mite which require much more inspecting depending on the genetics of your hive and also on your strategy to manage for all mites but often people are inspecting a lot through the spring and summer season for those mites and doing the treatments and so on so it's information for that is from your local beekeepers to find out yeah often you need to inspect hives in your area now when you put the frames back into your home just to make sure that this window lines up neatly so so it makes a nice nice flat pattern it creates that observation there so you can look in and see how your honey is going okay let's wander up and have a look at another hive just so I can show you what it looks like when they isn't much honey in my frames you got more questions about six weeks ago and we actually got to capture that swarm which is great but this needs a little bit of love because you have a look in this window at the back here much action there's you can't see a whole lot of bees so we want to get in there and make sure there's plenty of food showing that they're queens narrow lane and the hive will bounce back look in the side window there's a little bit like on bees the Sun but um I'm going to open up now the observation windows and we're given frames to commercial beekeepers they tend to disregard their in frame view you thinking that they used to just lifting the high oven going well it's heavy enough time to harvest but after a while they realized that this is actually really useful as so much you can gauge from this end frame view you can actually watch the colors of the honey come in you can watch whether there's enough bees you can really learn a lot about what's going on in your hive just by looking in the windows so we've had some good feedback from the canadian commercial beekeepers on that and that they really enjoy the windows now I'm just opening up there's a little bit of honey storage going on which is good so we are getting some new nectar coming in and some light capping but otherwise it's looking a bit a bit light on so certainly might be harvesting this frame anytime soon which was also clear by the end frame view which was showing no honey at all so it really did give you a good idea of what's going on in the frame which is a whole lot of not much you have a look at this side there's some almost no nectar at all that's a pretty pretty dry frame here but you can see the way they've connected the wax between the cells let's pull that one more frame which is even even earlier in it's this one that's actually got some honey so it's possible that frame that I just pulled out we harvested and they've eaten honey yet but here is that here is the side window view so you this was visible through the side window which is another useful feature of the flow home and you can see there there's there's no honey at all but you can see the way they've used their wax to join the parts of the flow frame together and create their hexagon cells so they know if you can see that if you look nice and close on the angle there you can see the wax they're using is a certainly Briana color you can see the way they've joined all the parts and that's the first thing they do before they start putting nectar in your cells and starting to to D water it to create the honey asking if you've ever seen different types of honey in a single flow frame absolutely so bees when they run out of one flower they will move on to another so it really just depends on what's going on with the flowers around you so if you've got a lot of short flowerings of different things then you will get times where there's different colored honey's in one frame and sometimes you'll see it coming out with that would too with the two-tone honey flowing out of the tube which is bunda see but generally you get on on a nice play see they might feel a couple of frames so you get frames of one flavor here and then feel a couple more frames as they work from the inside of the high back to the extremities you'll find you'll get different flavors across the box but that does depend if you're on a on a mono floral sauce you'll get all of one thing across your whole honey super so it really does depend but it is nice to have the option of isolating those flavors more say thanks a lot for watching have you got more questions we do have questions coming Kate wants to know if we have to if we do anything special to the jars before you put honey in them did we sterilize them okay before putting putting honey in the jars it's not necessary to sterilize them I would recommend recycling jars from your kitchen drawers but do make sure they're clean honey is antibacterial has amazing properties and for me anyway it doesn't need any any sterilization certainly what's in the jar shouldn't make your honey go off what will make your honey off is if you harvest them too early let's say you harvested a frame like this and they're really the honey isn't ready it's just nectar then you'll have a a moisture content well above 20% in which case fermentation will occur in a month or two after it's been put in the jar unless it's in the frigid or you've eaten it so so um I was thinking early will create off honey not so much sterilization in the jars but good question preserving Jam you do need to sterilize the jars but not with honey um Jolene's asking how would she know if she's bought a genetically calm queen okay the best way is to ask your queen breeder now if they won't know for sure but they'll be breeding as best they can genetics and every hive is if analysis like dogs or any other animal they they that the breeder might say this is really nice calm genetics but then in turns out to be a little more aggressive than you'd hoped so you don't always know but buying queen of a queen breeder will definitely increase your chances and if they're artificially inseminating then will increase the chances again and you will actually to get a very calm hive we have introduced Queens here a little bit bit more so we're just splitting using natural splits you've got a lot of friendly colonies as well so sometimes that's a bit lack of the draw day I've got one more question Ben's asking should I clean and excluder that he's getting filled with burr comb to make it easier for the worker bees to move into the super okay I tend to clean in the excluder for another reason let's just say when you put the hive back together it's a bit easier to put back together without squashing bees the bees themselves they will make room no to wax away if they're having trouble getting up through the excluder so a more cleaner just to to make it easier to inspect your home and put back together thanks a lot for watching next week we'll cover something new so please tune in again this time next week and if you've got questions save them up for me and I'll be happy to happy to answer them to help you get started with your be giving in your photo

Channel: Flow Hive

Views: 27,705

Keywords: flowhive, flow hive, beekeeping, honeyflow, bee, honey, honeybee, bees, urban beekeeping, beekeeper, flow honey, savethebees, flow frame inspection, flow frame

Id: DAsgSooISOk

Length: 26min 17sec (1577 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 22 2018