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.
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