In 2023, my attempts to harvest honey from my flow hive supers and my full flow hive was a disaster. The problem was the honey didn’t flow toward the back because the hive was too level. After you’ve fractured the honey frames by turning your long, metal, key tool, gravity will cause the honey to simply – and disastrously – pool in the bottom of the hive, rather than flow along the tube to the back where you can collect it. This can cause your bees to drown, which I think happened to me last year. It took a year to fully resuscitate all my hives and is why I didn’t make any more attempts in 2023 to collect any honey.
The two flow hive honey supers that were on top of traditional 10-frame brood boxes couldn’t easily be lifted in the front to allow the honey to flow out the back. When I tried to lift them up a little in the front, the bees in the brood box were very upset and let me know! They streamed out and made collecting the honey very difficult.
My full flow hive (upper and lower boxes) was supposed to be easily adjustable to lift the front. Even with the little level visible in the window, the screws on the legs were too hard to turn under the weight of the flow hive to tilt the front upward to allow flow toward the back.
Here is an image shared by another flow hive owner showing his honey pooling disaster. My hands were too full managing the problem to take photos myself, but this is the problem I wanted to solve in 2024. And did! Hurray!!
I bought two (they come as a set of 2) inexpensive “arm lift jacks” on Amazon. Here is what the two jacks look like as I used them to slightly lift the front of my flow hive.
Thanks to these jacks, it couldn’t have been easier – or more successful – to lift the front of the entire hive, not disturbing the bees, and let the honey flow to the back where I collected it. You can also see one of the backs visible at the front of the hive, from the side, toward the end of my video showing the honey flowing nicely out the back.
January 23rd. That’s a record for early honey draw at Golden Glow Gardens. No doubt the three capped frames in Hive One’s honey super were a result of having left the bees alone ever since we did a 1-2 frame draw in Spring 2021 and the bees were then robbed of all the rest of their stores.
Looking into the side window I was met with a welcome sight of tons of bees working to fill and cap the outermost frame. There were so many bees, I couldn’t see past them to check how much of this frame was capped.
I caught glimpses of glistening in some cells which tells me the cells are filling with honey, but not yet capped. I’ll definitely leave this frame for the bees to keep working on.
Here is a picture of the honey frames I’m going to harvest seen from the Flow Hive’s back window.
The honey had overwintered and was dark reddish amber in color and delicious with a richness of flavor different from the light spring honey I expect we’ll be drawing in a few months. Can’t wait to see what the bees refill these frames with to compare.
This time, I took two frames of honey and I’ll be keeping vigil closely over the next few days to be sure no robbing takes place.
I believe the reason robbing is more common after a flow hive draw is that honey leaks and pools at the bottom of the honey hive after the draw. Until this gets cleaned up by the bees, it attracts predators.
Speaking of which, during my flow hive inspection, I noticed a lot of ants. While ants aren’t supposed to be harmful to a healthy hive, I am going back to the apiary tomorrow and coating the legs of the bee stand with tanglefoot to keep ants from climbing from the ground to the hives.
This weekend, I also spread diamataceous earth around the base of the bee stand. That also should help keep ants at bay. My original purpose of spreading the diamataceous earth was to repel hive beetles, but all the better if it serves two purposes.
These photos, spread out from March through September, show a nice steady increase in the build-up of honey through the end of June, when we harvested just two frames from an almost-full honey super on hive #1. Hive #1 was started with a package of bees in March that we bought from an apiary in George. Hive #2 was added mid-summer as a result of a swarm we took from a friend’s property so we intended not to harvest anything from that hive this summer).
What appeared to happen is after we uncapped a few frames June 24th and removed honey, the hive either was robbed, or a good number of bees from the hive loaded themselves up with honey and swarmed away from the hive.
Disappointingly, the bees have been very, very slow to add honey to their super since the end of June, and the honey that had been almost full in other frames in hive 1 – and that we did not harvest – has never been refilled. The bees still occupy hive 1, although not with as much population as before the honey harvest.
Our plan is not to supplement the bees with sugar syrup, but also not to disturb them, leaving them to overwinter and then start next year and try again to build up their honey stores.
We think one mistake we may have made was not to tip the hive when we harvested the honey. This was due to not having the Flow Hive bottom and only a regular brood box. We thought that tipping the hive was just something you had to do if you had a complete flow hive, top and bottom. Next year, we will tip up the hive to let any honey that drops to the bottom of the hive flow out.
We also have a new, complete flow hive which we plan to set up early next spring and maybe we will avoid the problems we had this year with hive 1 by using a complete flow hive.
Sept 29: Disappointingly little progress laying up honey. LARGE amounts of propolis between frames. I’ll ask Cedar about this at HoneyFlowHives and get back to you about what that means.
August 25th: not much change
August 7th: The cupboards are bare and the bee population seems less too.
July 22: Very quiet
July 5th: After harvesting a few frames, other frames were emptied out that we hadn’t harvested from.
June 24: Honey Harvest!
Mid June, Before Frames were Capped, and Harvested:
March 7th: Honey frames filling up nicely, though no capping, and the outer frame (visible through the view window) not capped.
My trusty smoker that I purchased on Amazon years ago had been giving me problems lately, not staying lit. I cleaned it. Still no luck. Then I took a closer look inside. Lo and behold, the all-important metal disk I call an aerator because it sits slightly above the bottom of the smoker, allowing air flow under the fuel, was missing. I bet one time when I was throwing away the spent burned-up fuel ashes from the smoker, I turned it upside down over the ash bin and didn’t notice that the metal disk went out along with the debris. Ooops!
I checked online to see if I could purchase just a replacement aerator because otherwise the smoker was in fine shape, and should have been good for many more years of use. Unfortunately, my only buying options were to buy a whole new smoker.
If this happens to your smoker, know that there’s an easy, inexpensive DIY solution. Just cut off the bottom of an aluminum can, about an inch from the top. Then cut down from the edge where you cut off the rest of the can (being very careful – wear gloves – because the edge will be sharp) down to the bottom about 1/2 inch apart, all the way around. Next, bend these small sections up so that the new aerator sits up off the bottom of the smoker on these bent-up supports. Lastly, poke holes in the bottom of the can for air flow. Voila! A do-it-yourself aerator to extend the life of your smoker.
The end of summer August to October is a challenging time for honey bees. This season is characterized by oppressive heat, drought, and a shortage of pollen and nectar. The bees naturally start making less brood and pushing drones out of the hive reducing the bee populations in size to only the bees that are essential to overwinter the colony.
If we inspect our hives and determine that our bees do not have enough honey to feed themselves through the winter, we will provide them with sugar syrup in a one-to-one ratio of sugar to water. For the hive that we recently rescued, sugar syrup supplementation was essential because we had put the swarm into a hive with bare frames and they had to quickly build out a store of honey to get through the winter.
While sugar syrup has its benefits, it does not supply the pollen necessary for reproduction. So when late-season blooms come along, we are thrilled that our bees can enrich their diet with nectar. One of the best late-season blooms that’s happening right now is a variety of eucalyptus tree that typically blooms during August and September. Here’s a video we took this morning on a hike showing bees delighting in the blossoms from this eucalyptus tree.
We enlist the expert help of Hilary Kearney to watch our hives and harvest our honey as we aren’t in Southern California very often. She is wonderful, super knowledgeable, and can be a great resource for anyone needing help with bees in San Diego area or just with information in general. She runs classes, writes an excellent blog, and has a good instagram account. Check out Girl Next Door Honey!
We checked our two hives on June 21st and found they were both doing very well. Interestingly, our left hive has surpassed the right one in status even though we established this hive about 3 weeks after the right hive. There are more capped honey frames filled in the left hive than the right. We also notice more bees in the top honey super on the left than the right. Also, the bees in the left hive drink their sugar-water supplementation about three times as fast as the bees in the right hive
showing the golden honey in the sun
note the small section of capped honey on top
We’re not sure if it’s the reason why the left hive is more robust and is growing faster, but the bees in the left hive are also much more aggressive than the bees on the right. Could they have a touch of Africanism, we wonder?
left hive: large capped area
right hive – less honey capped so far
More photos of the honey build up in the top supers of our hives:
