It's Nearly Time To Make That Honey FLOW!

In my previous video, I showed you how to encourage your bees upstairs into your Flow Hive super. In this colony here, I did that 2 weeks ago, and I'm gonna show you just how well it's worked. As I said in the previous video, you need to make sure that your brood box is completely full to the brim with bees and with brood, but don't get caught out by making them fill it with honey. Previous recap on the video, we took out any honey frames, we bruised them down, put them to the center of the colony, used that excess honey to smear on the face of some of these Flow Hive supers, directly onto the frame. And now what we're seeing is really good action upstairs in the Flow Hive supers. Easiest way for me to show you, get it on camera. First thing we're going to do is open the door and show you why it's a little bit misleading using these doors, because the bees don't always work on the outsides first. So if you were to take off your window and you were to see this activity here— I know the window needs a little bit of a clean from the inside, maybe a job for the winter— you'd kind of think, okay, we've got bees up in the super, this is very good snooze. And I would say this is like 70 or 80% of the battle, actually getting the bees to go up there. You do that by smearing all of your mush, all of your wax, all of your honey on the frames, and you force the bees up there to clean them. However, once the bees actually reach a number in the colony where they've not got sufficient space to live in the brood nest, they are just going to naturally go up there anyway. But just because you're seeing minimal activity on the outside frames doesn't mean that on the inside frames there's going to be minimal activity either. Let's get in. I'll pull out the central frame and I'll show you just how well the bees are doing. So top of the Flow Hive super again doesn't look like a huge amount of activity, but really good to see bees even up here. Once you get the bees going up there, they will, if there's a flow, start storing the honey up there. But let me pull out that central frame now and show you what the bees have done. So as you can see, the bees are filling this super up like crazy. Over here in this corner, this is what it looks like when you've got no honey in there, and then as you get further and further into the center, you can see natural wax being drawn on top of the plastic. That is a sure sign that the bees are using the super, and not only that, they are filling it with honey. Really keen to do this video to give you that intermediate step, to show you just what this honey looks like before the bees start capping it over and before you actually get to a point of doing a harvest. Really, really happy with how well it's going. Probably about 2 or 3 weeks away, I would say, from these bees, these whole frames being ready. But what's so nice with the Flow Hive is that you can harvest a frame at a So as soon as I go in here and look at this frame and see that it's completely capped over, I know I can turn that screw and I can go and extract some honey directly from my hive. So I'll give you a little close-up of it there as well. It is surprisingly heavy, these frames. Obviously the frames are gonna be a little bit more heavier than the wooden frames, but there is a huge amount of nectar, huge amount of honey being ripened up in this frame. So, so happy with it. Can't wait to get that key out and actually try some local Flow Hive honey. So there we go, a little quick look inside the Flow Hive showing you that those tips and tricks really do work. If you're struggling to get your bees up, make sure they're strong enough, make sure they're not storing honey in the brood nest. If they are, bruise the frames, stick them in the center, smear wax and honey on your Flow Hive super frames, and you too will get colonies like this that are working towards a really nice flow honey harvest.