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.
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.
