Wrapping up the Honey Flow Season

The sunflowers have finally bloomed!

August 14

Today the Flow Frames were set aside after extracting the remainder of the honey - another 10kg+. Our total yield from this one producing hive was 33.55kg (74lbs). All I can say is WOW! It has certainly been a very good summer for honey. Thanks to the bees for all their work. Now it’s time to add Varroa mite medication and, even though there are still flowers, we’ll start providing the bees with a steady supply of sugar water to aid in the production of their winter stores. When it gets cold we’ll add an insulating wrap and a wind tarp on the north/west fence wire.

This is the Flow Hive with  the flow frames removed. The bees still in the box that held the frames will gradually move back into the hive and then the empty box will be used to house the sugar water dispenser (an inverted 2 quart jar with tiny holes in the lid) until it’s no longer needed. The 2 remaining bee boxes need to weigh about 70lbs each (bees and honey) to maintain the hive during the winter. Less and starvation can result.

Smoking the bees to settle them so that the Varroa mite medication strips can be inserted. 

Honey Harvest Time

This is what the flow frames look like when they are full of honey.

So they say it takes 3 years to establish a good bee hive. I guess that’s right because this is our 3rd summer and our bees have given us 23kg of honey - so far. One more harvest then we’ll remove the Flow Hive and let them finish preparing for winter. So we finally answer the question - does a Flow Hive work in the centre of Alberta? It certainly does!

Harvest is easy. Open a frame with a special key after attaching a spout leading to a jar and the honey simply pours out. The  clear wrap on the top of the jar is to seal it off so  bees don’t fly into the jar during the process. The resultant honey is clean and requires no processing of any kind. The bees are not disturbed, damaged or killed during the process. No equipment is required. It just can’t be any easier than this!

We transferred the honey into one kilogram containers using a small weigh scale. All DONE!

Having successfully over-wintered our bees for three winters now (and we had quite a number of -40C days this last winter), we decided it was time to get another Flow Hive. We at first planned to split the original hive. Our bee friend brought us a new queen intending to introduce her into the new hive which would be made using a few frames of bees from the old hive. But when he had a good look at our original hive he determined the queen was not doing her egg laying job as well as she should. So, instead of placing the new queen in a new hive she was used to replace the queen in the original hive. A few weeks later he brought a new box of bees and another queen which we transferred into our new Flow Hive when it arrived in the mail and my husband assembled it.

Here’s my husband removing a frame from the transport box. 

Shaking the bees off a the last frame by the new hive. The Flow Hive has 8 frames and the transport hive had 9 so one had to be eliminated. 

The transport box still had quite a few bees left inside. They are gently brushed off in front of their new home.

Official photographer