Beginner Beekeeping - August

In this month’s beginner beekeeping Q & A, Cedar tackled topics such as the plastic used in Flow Frames, tips and tricks for harvesting and cycling brood frames.

 

 

 

Video Transcription

Welcome, I'm Cedar Anderson. And what we're going to be doing today is discussing beekeeping. And if you've got questions, put them in the comments below. There's no such thing as a silly question, it's all about helping each other learn today. It's about beginner beekeeping questions, so don't be shy. We're going to be running through how to harvest your Flow Hive. It's a common question we get, we've got a lot of new beekeepers, which is absolutely fantastic. So what we're going to do is running through some of the things you should consider before you harvest your hive. Then we'll show you exactly how to do it. So if you look in the window here, you can see that there are a lot of bees in this hive. Now that's a good sign that it's happy and healthy. Also a sign that it's probably time to do some spring management.

So this spring we'll be splitting this hive into two, and we've gotlots of videos showing you just how to do that. So the back of the hive here is where you get a cross-section view of the frames. Now that's something my father and I invented and that's the Flow Frame. And it gives you this beautiful view to see when the honey is ready and capped. So when choosing a frame that is full, you can see here that this one's a bit empty. The bees have eaten some of the honey out of that. And this one here looks like they've filled all the cells and they've capped them. So straight away, I'm looking at that going, this is probably the best one to harvest at the moment. If you're unsure, you can just harvest a little bit and leave the rest for the bees.

So the next thing I'm going to do is get my shelf brackets. Now, these come with our Flow Hive 2+, but you can also get them for the Classics. So the bracket simply goes over a screw. You can choose your height. Now, if you had a big jar, you'd be right down here like this. But in this case, we're going to go for smaller jars here. And if you're harvesting into tiny jars for a wedding or something, you'd go for a screw up here. So the shelf brackets go on like that. And then you use the rear window cover to make a nice shelf for your jar and the shelf should just slip in like that.

It's always a good idea if you're beginning at beekeeping, to wear your bee suit. Protect yourself, wear a veil and when you are more comfortable with beekeeping, then you can experiment with taking those things off. So just a word of caution, make sure you're looking after yourself and those around you. Bees can have a nasty sting.

So you'll need a tube like this. So choosing the frame, you'll take out this lower cap. Now, sometimes this can be a bit hard, that one's quite easy to get out. But you can always use this point here on the cap, just to lever that out. There's a good little tip there. And this tongue bit goes into the bottom. Now a quick check to make sure there's no debris in here that needs cleaning out. You could always give that a wash by putting a cloth on your Flow key, but that looks nice and clean, and in we go with our tube. Now, if you come up to the top, you've got the key access cover, and a top cap here that comes out, and that gives you access for this key here. And I'm going to put this key in, there are two slots at the top, and it's going to go in the lower one. And if you want to harvest a small amount, you can insert it just a little ways and give that a turn. What that does is, it creates channels inside the comb and it flows down and you can see it coming down the tube already. Look at that. Isn't that a beautiful sight to watch the honey just flowing straight out of the hive. Can't wait to taste that. 

So it was about a decade of development by my father and I to get to this turn-the-key, easy way to harvest. I've got lots of memories of doing it the old way with my grandfather as a young child, taking the frames out, taking them to the processing shed, de-capping them with a hot knife, making sure you have brushed off the bees and left them behind. And it's good fun, but it's a lot of work. So after a while you really enjoy this new way of harvesting. But try it the old way as well, just so you can get a sense of the ease and beauty of just being able to watch the honey pour directly out into your jar.

Beekeeping Questions

I harvested honey a couple of days ago, but two days later it looks like a lot of my bees are gone. Is it a bit early for a swarm? (Northern NSW, Australia)

There have been a few early swarms. So here we are in the last month of winter in the Southern hemisphere and in the warmer more temperate areas where we are, we're hearing of a few swarms already. So it could be the case. If you find that your hive has swarmed, then a good idea to keep an eye on them, make sure that they are indeed building up and your queen is laying so your hive can get back on its feet. While it's in that weak time when there's less bees to look after all the surfaces of all the combs, just also keep an eye on those hive beetles. If you've got the Flow Hive 2, you've got the pest management tray where you can put some oil and catch those hive beetles. It's a good idea to stay on top of them if your hive is a little bit weak.

How often should you clean the pest management tray?

So it's a bit of an as-needed basis. You find that some debris builds up in there, and it's a good idea to clean that out. You also find that after heavy rain, you could get some water blowing in the entrance, going through the screen bottom board and down into the tray below. It's a good idea to tip that out. It depends a little bit on what you're doing. Some people use detergent and water to catch beetles. Other people are using using oil to catch the beetles and other people aren't using it at all. Some people will leave the tray out altogether. So it depends a bit on what you want to do, but giving it a bit of a cleanup is not a bad idea.

Does the plastic in the Flow Frames flavour the honey? Are the bees get affected by it?

So we put a lot of effort and thought into that. When you're harvesting in conventional ways, you do get a lot of flavour from things like metal going into the honey. And then you can even taste it. If you leave honey on a teaspoon for a while, you'll get a metallic taste and that's the honey reacting with that metal. Beekeepers conventionally would put honey in metal drums and the whole lot ends up tainted and flavoured. So it is a really good idea to think about what you're putting your honey in and how the flavour might change in doing so. We've chosenmaterials specifically for the best food-grade options here so that we don't affect the honey. And also the bees cover those moving parts in wax. So your honey is being cocooned inside the beeswax, inside the moving parts. But that's a great question, and yes, we've thought a lot about that.

During a nectar dearth when there are not many flowers blooming, should you not harvest honey from your Flow Hive? Would this cause robbing activity in your apiary? (Arizona, USA)

If you find you are needing to harvest in a dearth, I wouldn't harvest all your frames because ultimately the bees are a bit hungry in that time and you want to leave the honey for the bees. So if you find that you still want to harvest some honey, then what you'll need to do is make sure you're covering your jars. You can use a kitchen wrap, or beeswax wrap, or some of that plastic cling wrap. Or even your veil if you haven't got anything else. Just to make sure if there are hungry bees around, they're not all piling into your honey harvesting jar.

If I leave the super on the brood box over the winter should I keep the queen excluder on or remove it?

So if you live in a cold climate, you might need to get some advice from your local beekeepers, what they would do. In this temperate region, we don't have to remove the queen excluder for the wintertime. But in thosecolder places, when you're expecting the bees to all ball up in a big ball and slowly move around the hive, consuming the honey. They usually move from the bottom up to where you've got honey stores, as they need the resources to keep themselves warm. They disconnect their wing muscles, they vibrate and they can warm themselves, which is amazing. But if they run out of honey, they can't do that. So if you imagine that ball moving up through the hive, then you could find that the queen is left behind underneath the excluder and the rest of the bees are clustering up where there are honey stores. So that's the reason in those colder regions you'll need to remove your queen excluder for winter, so the queen can stay nice and warm with the ball of bees. If you do find you have left it in, and it's very cold and it's a long winter and the ball of bees has moved up through the hive and left the queen behind to perish, you'll need to rectify that situation with a new queen come springtime.

How far away from my house should I put my hive?

So it's up to you, it also depends on how comfortable you are with bees and also the temperament of the colony. I've got bees very close to my front door, but that's a hive I put there that I know has got friendly genetics, and it doesn't bother us. And I've got young kids, et cetera, but I'm an experienced beekeeper. So as you get started and as you learn, you might not want them directly at your front door, but further out in your yard. At a place where perhaps the dog isn't going to disturb the hive and perhaps nobody's walking in front of the hive. So things like that you'll need to consider when situating your hive. If you spin around here, you can see how close we are to the house with a good number of hives, but beehives are what we do. Now, you can run into issues if your hive is really close to the front door, and you've got a porch light at night. The bees can get a bit confused and fly towards that light which might create some issues with a few bees buzzing around still in the morning when you come out. You can always switch that light off, but there's things to consider like that. Having said that, people will keep hives on their balconies in the city, in small urban backyards, on their rooftops. And some even keep them inside their house with terminals and tubes for them going out. But that's more advanced.

Any tips for deterring hive beetles from the Flow Hive?

So the Flow Hive 2 has a tray at the bottom, you can slide out and in there you can put oil or you could try detergent and water as well. And that'll catch a whole lot of beetles as the bees chase them down through the screened bottom board. Now the Classic has screen at the bottom as well, but it doesn't have the tray. So there's a few ways you can catch beetles with the Classic and one, I've got avideo showing it. You can use a fluffy surface and the beetles will go down and catch their legs in it because they've got these little spurs on their legs and they'll get entangled in the fluffy stuff. It's like a tablecloth in those cheaper restaurants and it's got vinyl on one side and a fluffy surface underneath, and you can get that material at your local fabric store and use that. However, if you are using that, make sure it goes in the bottom slot and tape it down entirely to your corflute slider because you don't want the bees dragging that up through the screen. Because they'll tend to get hold of it and try and pull it upwards. Another thing you could do is make your own oil tray just by using perhaps a shallow Tupperware container, or even the lid of a Tupperware container, slide it on top of your corflute slider and put some oil in that. And you could catch some beetles that way. So there's a few few options there. But the Flow Hive 2 and 2+ have a better pest management system in the bottom.

Does it matter which side the window is on the Flow Hive Classic?

The Flow Hive Classic, which we don't now have many examples set up just here, has the window on the left side, so that'd be the correct way to set it up. So left side, when you're at the harvesting side of the hive.

How do you know when the Flow Hive is ready to harvest?

When you're seeing the capping down the edge of the frame. Looking at this one here, I can tell the bees are a little bit hungry because there's this patchy arrangement. So you're better off waiting until you're seeing a lot more honey in here coming right out to the edges and they're putting the capping on. We're in our winter here and we can harvest a little bit of honey, but we can't harvest a lot right now. We're expecting that to change in the next few weeks. So keeping an eye on that really tells you a bit about what's going on in the hive. You can also have a look in the side windows and check. In this case, there's so many bees in this hive that they're ready to go. Ready to build up and either have another box or divide and start a new colony.

So looking in the side windows, you'll get a good idea of when you see capping. Now let's see what's in this side window here. So you're looking at it and you can see that capping there on top of the Flow Frames to the left, you can see some open cells, which are ones they haven't capped yet. You can still see the hexagons and down there is nectar glistening. So that frame isn't quite ready to harvest, but it's close. What you want to do is try and harvest it when you've got most of the capping on. However, you can't always tell. Sometimes in the centre they've gotten hungry and they've eaten out a bunch of the honey in the frame.

Do you have to empty the whole frame when you're harvesting?

No, you don't. You can just harvest a little bit of a frame by putting the key in a little way and turning it. And that'll harvest just a small part of the frame. That's another great thing about the Flow Hive. When we were conventionally harvesting we would always get in there and take the whole lot just because we were in there, even if it wasn't all capped. And the reason is it's such a ordeal to go through that process of taking your hive apart and taking all the frames to a processing place, getting your extractor all cleaned out, getting it all set up, getting out a hot knife, going and cutting the capping off. You wouldn't do it for just a part of a frame or even a few frames. You tend to do multiple hives at once and do it in a batch to make that process a bit more efficient.

But with a Flow Hive, you can just put the key in a little way and turn it and tap off just a few jars of honey. Or you could go ahead and harvest more frames. It's a little bit easier on the bees if you harvest perhaps two or three frames at one time, rather than the whole lot. Because the bees can then get to work recycling the remaining wax and honey and using it in the adjacent frames. And it's just less disturbance. Keeping in mind, the bees do use honey as a thermal mass for their hive. You have a big area of liquid honey, it's storing heat and it helps balance out your hive. So that's why bees tend to have honey on the extremities of their brood nest. It helps them in regulating the temperature of their brood nest.

A lot of my Flow Frames look filled at the end-view, but can be quite empty in the middle bottom section. Is it okay to harvest these frames?

So that's exactly what's happened here today. So if you look at these frames, you can tell the bees are a little bit hungry because of the way they've got this patchy pattern. Where there were cells full of honey and then they ate them out. So you see some are capped and some are empty. When you see that pattern, you're likely to also get a little bit of honey missing from the centre of the frame you're harvesting, but that doesn't necessarily mean you can't harvest it. It just means you get less honey out of that frame. And it doesn't necessarily mean that the water content will be too high. And it just depends. You can get into the situation where you're just at that moment where they did eat it out, but they're part way through filling it back up. And in that case, you could get a high moisture content. That's not what's happened today. The honey's looking good and it's a beautiful honey. Still, if you notice it's quite liquid in the jar, it just means that it won't keep as long. And you might need to consume that honey before fermentation occurs. Looking in the window really gives you an idea of what's going on, both in the side windows and in the rear window. And after a while, you'll get to know when you're likely to have a nice honey or not.

Why aren't there a lot of bees buzzing around the jars when you harvest? Are there any tips or tricks to avoid that happening?

There's a few things here. If bees have a taste for honey and the robbing mentality, then they will likely go after the honey. But if they're not, it'll take them a while to notice for a start that there's honey there at the back of the hive. And then they'll have to go and do a dance inside the hive to say, "Hey, there's a great source of honey around the back." And then the bees could cotton on to it. If you start to see bees arriving at the honey at the back of your hive, then simply cover it up with some plastic kitchen wrap or a beeswax wrap, or even your veil if you need to. Cover up the jar and make sure you're not getting bees diving into the honey.

If you get one or two bees jumping in, you can just fish them out and put them back on the landing board. And it's not usually a problem, but it's more if they really start buzzing around, that you want to cover up that. So limit the access to the honey for the bees. It's really only a problem when the bees are in that robbing mentality, they don't have much honey, they've been exposed to some kind of source outside that's either sugar or honey and they're looking for that instead of flowers. And that's when you can run into an issue there.

How much honey do you get from a single Flow Frame? Is it comparable to a frame of honey out of a conventional hive?

When the frame is full, you will get about 3kg of honey from a Flow Frame. Now that's more than a conventional frame, but bear in mind, we've got less of those per hive. We've got six instead of eight frames, that make up this box here. And that's just how the mathematics worked out, the Flow Frames are a little bit wider. Bees like to make their cells wider when they're using them for honey instead of brood. And we don't want the hive to think these are for use as brood cells.

Is it common to see brood and honey on the same frame?

In the brood nest, yes. You'll almost always have a bit of honey around the edges, particularly at the top and the corners of your brood frames and that's perfectly normal.

I'm preparing to do my first hive split to fill my second hive. Should I wait until there's a honey flow on? (Southern QLD, Australia)

Well, it's a good idea to get ahead of the curve. So this hive here, if you look in the windows, you'll see there are a lot of bees. If your hive looks like that, then it's not a bad idea to split that. Now in your area, spring comes earlier, it pretty much comes now. Here we are in August and we're expecting the honey flow to be coming on, if it's not already started. So if your bees are building up like that, it's a good idea to get ahead of the curve and take your hive split. And that will alleviate the swarming tendencies. You can't always hang around all day waiting to catch a swarm, better to get ahead of the curve and take a hive split. If you don't want another hive, another colony of bees then somebody else surely will.

I'm seeing a few bees on the landing board, is it time to add the super? What's the best way to tell when it's time to add the super box? (Brisbane, Australia)

The best time is when your brood box is nice and full with bees. So just have a look and make sure they've drawn out all of the frames. So get in your bee suit, get the smoker out and take the lid off. Lift up the edge frames and just check that they are indeed using those frames and the wax is drawn all the way out. And if you've got that and a lot of bees when you open the lid, then it's a good time to put your super on in preparation for the nectar flow to come.

Where you get a queen bee from? If you've got a queen bee in your hive, do all the other bees come then into your hive?

So the way it works is, you do need a queen bee for a functioning colony and there's usually only one in a hive. Now to start a colony, you need more than just the queen. So you can order queen bees in the mail, but that won't get you very far. You will also need enough bees that can forage and build comb and start a colony. So the way that usually happens is, you take some of the frames out of a box like this, and you put them into a new box. You either let them raise their own queen or you order a queen from a bee breeder and put that in that new hive split. You get some known genetics and you can ask for nice placid bees. If you're letting them raise their own, you don't know what you're going to get, so it's a little bit of a gamble. And sometimes you get those aggressive traits coming through, which just aren't so much fun to do your hive inspections with and so on. So ordering a queen is a great way to go.

If you do want to just order and start from scratch, the easiest thing to do is order a nucleus, which is about half the frames in this bottom box in a nice little container usually made out of corflute. And in there will be frames with a lot of bees, with brood, with honey, a functioning little hive. You can then transfer those into your brood box, look after them and they'll grow.

You can also order a package of bees, which is like an artificial swarm. Where a beekeeper has shaken off a whole lot of bees, perhaps five to 10,000 bees into a box. And then they usually add a queen and some syrup to feed her while she was in transport. And packages like that can be sent in the mail. And you'll get some surprise looks from your post person as they rock up carrying a big buzzing box of bees. But anyway, that's the way it's done.

So you can also go catching swarms in the springtime. And a bait hive is another way to go where you can put hives, usually around where there's existing beehives. And you can lure them in with scents of swarm commander or lemongrass oil, things like that. But that's a little bit of a hit and miss method. There's a few options, you can do to get started. Taking a split from a friend is a great way to go, especially in the springtime when you're probably solving a problem for them, which is the bees building up on wanting more room.

When is the best time to start your hive?

So the best time to start your hive is just before a good nectar flow, which typically is the springtime in most areas. However, here in the subtropics, unusually we've had even inland from here, great nectar flows and harvests happening all winter. So it really does depend on the season and whereabouts you are in the world. If you ask your local beekeepers, they'll be able to give you a good idea. But I'd say the best time to start is when you can. And often that's a bit dictated by when you can get bees or when you can get time to go through the process of building your hive. So if I were you, I'd get prepared. Get your equipment, start putting your hive together, get it all ready. And that way you're all set up, ready to go when you can get your bees. And then you can go and instal them and away you go.

We removed the super for winter and now the brood box is full. Is there a temperature range that we should wait for before putting the super back on? Or is it about the numbers of bees? (Melbourne, Australia)

It's more about the foraging activity. So the idea of making your hives smaller during those long cold winters is just giving the hive a bit less room to look after they can keep it warmer. They still need enough food to get through winter, but at that point, you're just making a bit easier by giving them a more appropriately sized hive, to keep warm with the amount of bees that are in it. Come springtime, a good thing to do is just watch the activity and see if they're starting to bring in resources, you'll see the pollen balls on their hind legs and so on. And you'll even start to smell the honey coming in. And at that point, hopefully it's warming up a little bit and you can pop the lid and have a look and see whether they've filled any of those frames with new nectar. And at that time might be a good idea to put your super back on again. So typically spring is the time. So if not now, it's not too far away in your location.

Can I do a split straight into a hive or do I need to use a nuc box?

You can go straight into a hive and we've got lots ofvideos showing you exactly how to do that. You can have a look atTheBeekeeper.org, there's some great training material there in an online course. It's also a fundraiser for habitat, regeneration and protection. We also have lots of videos on ourYouTube channel andFacebook stream of of taking hive splits. And we'll probably do another live one soon where we actually demonstrate how to do a hive split live. But it's an enjoyable process. And as you say you can go directly into a brood box of this size and look after them and away they'll go. If you're doing an even split, you'll be taking half of the frames out of this brood box and putting it into the new one and replacing the empty space with fresh frames for them to build on. And that works quite nicely. You could also take just a couple of frames out of here, maybe three frames into your new box, and that'll be a slower start for that hive, but less impact on the mother hive. So there's a few options and things to consider there, but I always go into a full-size brood box and don't worry about the nuc box. So you can go ahead and do that too.

Can I put outside frames with honey and nectar and some brood into a new nuc for my next hive? Or if not, how do I dispose of these frames?

So we're talking about the brood box here and in the brood box, typically you get some honey on the edges and that's what they're calling an outside frame of honey. Then you come in and you'll start to get pollen stores and brood. And the main brood nest will be in the middle. It's not always like that, you can get a situation where you've got brood all the way up to the edges. And sometimes the hive is more lopsided and the brood nest is over to one side, but generally honey frames are on the outside. Now, if you're wanting to cycle those frames out, if you're usingnaturally drawn combs, then you can simply just cut the comb out and put the frame straight back in. You'd take that comb away, don't leave it out for the bees and you can then enjoy eating that at your next party.

It creates a great conversation. If we're allowed to do that one day in the distant future. And in that way you could then put the ones that you've just taken the comb out of, back in towards the centre and the cycle continues. If you've got wax and wire, you could do the same thing by cutting between the wires, but you need to take that away and put your foundation back in. If you've got plastic, then it's a bit harder. You'll need to take them away and scrape the honey and wax off that plastic foundation. But the idea is, you can just enjoy eating that comb and give the bees some nice, fresh comb in nice fresh frames to draw their wax and lay in during the springtime, and that just limits the swarming behaviour of your hive.

How do you get rid of brood frames that have gone a bit black and are not looking so healthy?

It's a good idea to cycle those out. If they have been in for a number of seasons, you'll find that they do get black and dark in the wax. And the idea is, cycling them out reduces the pathogen load and perhaps also insecticide load in the wax. Now to do that, you get those dark ones that have typically been used for brood a lot. And it's the buildup of the silk cocoons that changes them to a dark colour. Also the bees' footprints will darken the wax over time. You move them to the outside, wait for any brood to emerge from those frames. And then hopefully you've just got either empty cells or honey in those edge frames. And then if you're using naturally drawn comb, you can cut that straight out into an oven tray or something like that. And take that away and put the frame straight back in towards the centre again. And you get that continual cycle of taking out the old ones in the springtime, which also doubles as alleviating some of the swarm triggers, which is the overcrowding. If they've got fresh frames to build on and the queen can lay in, that will limit the swarm tendency. So cycling out the frames is a good idea for a number of reasons. If you've got wax and wire, you'll need to prepare a frame to switch with the frame on the edge. So just something to think about and prepare for there. If you find that there's still some brood all the way to the edge because your hive is so pumping, they're putting brood way out to the edges and you've got a tiny bit left. Then you can shift that and put that right under the lid here. Now, if you do that, then you'll be taking out this cap here, laying the brood frame on the side, fitting the lid as best you can over the top. Make sure it's sealed. So you can do that. You'll probably need to prop it up slightly. You don't want it lying flat on the surface and then you can just wait. If there's capped brood on there, you'll need to wait 11 days. If there's eggs on there, you need to wait 21 days before you can take that frame away. The bees will come up and look after any brood in that frame sitting under the lid. Normally I don't do that, but there's a little tip if you get stuck with a little bit of brood in a frame you want to cycle out.

I harvested honey that was quite runny and I think the moisture content was too high. is there a way that I can dehydrate that honey so that it won't ferment?

There is, and conventional beekeepers do that in processing plants. However, it's not something generally done on a home scale. So what you're probably better off doing is just keeping it in a fridge and that way you're really prolonging the time that it will last. Failing that, you could make mead from it, because for that you need to add water to the honey anyway. Or consume it, which isn't a problem in our house. Another things that beekeepers will do is they'll get a nice thick honey from another frame, they'll blend the two together to get an appropriate water content across two batches of honey. What you're aiming for is down around that 18% mark. So you can get something called a refractometer, you can test it and see. Or you can just look at the liquidity of the honey and just see how liquid it is, and that gives you a pretty good idea. When it's warm, it'll be quite liquid like this, but as it cools, that will be a nice thick honey with an acceptable moisture content.

Hundreds of my bees are spending lots of the time on the landing board and on the lower brood box, the super is already on. Do you think they're getting ready to swarm or is this normal?

So you'll often see in hot times, a lot of bees at the entrance and even covering the whole front of your hive all the way up. And they're just making sure there's enough ventilation within the hive. If you've got a lot of bee numbers, like you see in this hive here, then they actually can't adequately ventilate the hive. So today it started to turn really warm. A whole lot of those bees would have to get out of the hive in order to keep the ventilation cycle going. And that's what you often see at the front. If they're preparing to swarm, you can often get, what's called a bee beard hanging down off the landing board for a number of days prior to the swarming. So if you're seeing that, off the landing board and hanging down in a bit of a beard shape, then yes, that could be your bees preparing to swarm. So try and get ahead of the curve and take a hive split and that might alleviate that.

I put the super on my hive, the brood box is full and all the frames are drawn out, but the bees are not using the super. What can I do?

If you find that they're taking a while, the recipe for getting a good action on your Flow Frames are lots of bees when you open the side window coinciding with an abundance of nectar and then it happens quite quickly. If either of those two things are out, it can be quite slow. But there are things you can do if you're getting impatient. I practically never do anything, I just put the frames on and wait and eventually when the time's right, the bees will get in there and use that area for storage. But if you want to speed things up, you can scrape some burr comb off the top of your frames. If your hive is going great and is ready for the super, then you'll probably find they're putting a whole lot of burr comb on top of the wooden frames in the bottom box. Scrape that with your hive tool, press it into the Flow Frame surface, you won't damage the Flow Frames. Try it on the frames beside the windows so you can enjoy watching them repurpose the wax and cover some of the cells in wax and join up those Flow Frame parts as they get ready to do their amazing process of storing their nectar and turning it into honey.

I'm building a Slovenian bee house. Will the Flow Frames work with this?

The answer is yes, it has been done. And yes, I have mucked around a little bit at home. But basically those bee houses have an ingenious method of pulling the frames out from the back to access the brood. And with some mucking around you can certainly get it to work by putting the Flow Frames in the supers that also come out in this direction. So good luck with that and I hope you send us some pictures of how that all goes. 

Thanks again, and do let us know what you'd like us to tune in with next week. Check outTheBeekeeper.org if you'd really like to sink your teeth in to an in-depth training course, that's also a fundraiser for habitat regeneration and protection. A lot of experts from around the world are contributing to that and it's a wonderful thing. So thank you very much again for tuning in.

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