Stocking The Flow Hive - GO

I got bored of waiting for the perfect swarm to put into my Flow Hives, so I have filled them up in a very unconventional manner. Both of my Flow Hives are now full, the real one and the fake one. In this video, I'm going to show you how I got my bees in there, and this is the most bonkers method you have ever seen, but it's definitely no nonsense. Let's get inside, I'll show you the bees. I now have bees in my Flow Hives. So I know I've caused myself quite a lot of issues doing it this way, but I really didn't want to shook swarm a colony in and waste all of that brood. And risk them absconding. So what I've done is I've just rested up some of the national frames at the bottom of this brood box here. I've given it about a week. Hopefully the bees haven't gone crazy, put loads of wild comb in there, and they've moved up onto the Langstroth frames. In this video today, we're going to take away all of that wild comb, all of the wrong size frames. We're going to find the queen, get the colony back down to the correct size, and then fingers crossed we get some good weather and we can move forward with our Flow Hives. So I'm quite happy with this. It's actually worked out quite well. The comb that they've produced, not that much, easy to clear up. They're up in the Langstroth frames now, they're working the frames. What I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to shake out all of the bees back into that original box, make sure I find that queen, check for eggs, brood in all stages, take the original brood away, and then I'll be really confident that all the bees are orientated to this position. They're working those Langstroth frames already. They've got a little bit of stores in the Langstroth frames, so if we get a period of bad weather, they're going to be okay. I'm quite happy with what's gone on here. So I'll get inside, I'll give you a little sneak peek and show you exactly what I've done. So I've set my Flow Hive up on a double Langstroth configuration. The top box has got Langstroth frames in with foundation, and then the bottom box I've taken all the frames out and I've just rested the National deep frames in. I was really keen just to get the bees drawing out that foundation before I started taking any of the other boxes away. Always going to be a chance they're going to abscond, but now they're drawing out these frames, I'm much happier and I think this is going to work well. So here you can see exactly what I've done. I've taken 8 National deep frames and I've put them into a Langstroth box at a complete jaunty angle like that. Now if you just left them like that, they would create so much brace comb and wild comb in all those areas, but to do it for a week, not too bad at all. Little bit of comb, we can definitely live with that comb. That's going to be really easy to tidy up. And all I'm going to do now is I'm just going to complete that shook swarm and get all All of the bees onto the Langstroth frames, making sure that that queen is in there. Really, really simple, easy method using the wrong frames. There's tons of different methods that you could use here using the different frames, but this one here was the simplest one with no additional equipment. Gives you a little bit of a risk with wild comb, but if you leave it a short amount of time, then the bees should be fine. So there we go, simple as that. All I'm going to do now is remove that bottom brood box Place that off over to one side, put the additional brood box with the Langstroth frames back into the original position. I'm going to go through the DN4 national frames, shake off the bees, find the queen. I'll redistribute all of that brood to other beehives within this apiary, so it's not going to go to waste. That's going to set this colony right back, but hopefully they should build up again in order for me to get at least one full super in the summer. So I've cleared my box out. Gonna get that Langstroth box now and put that back into position. I've already got bees in here. The bees are working out those frames, so they are gonna know that this is home now. So as you can see, the bees are all going back over here to the original site. Doesn't matter what's going on over there now. I'm just gonna go through though, take those frames out, shake them in over here. I would really like to see the queen this manipulation, only 'cause I didn't see her last time when I put those frames in. So I'll go through this box now, see if we can find her. So see if you can see the queen on that frame. She is definitely on there, 100%. And if you didn't find her, she is at the top of the frame. They've worked the marking off, but there is the queen. I'm going to pick her up and place her into the hive. Right, I've seen her go down between the frames. Job is done. This is going to be so easy now. Right, so all of the bees are now in this single Langstroth box. 8-frame box. There's no brood in there at the moment, but there's definitely a queen in there. She is a bit of a laying machine, so she is going to turbocharge all those frames. And I reckon within 3 or 4 weeks, that is going to be completely full of brood, full of bees. And then we're going to force them up into that Flow Super, and hopefully we can start to get some decent honey coming out of the pipes. So there you go, simple as that. I have to say, and just for the record again, like, I am very much a Flow Hive amateur. So if there's anything that I do wrong, stick it in the comments. I'd love to know. Always good to learn. I just see what I see on YouTube. I know that flow hives can be difficult, and I know that some people are much, much better than I am at it. So if I'm doing anything wrong, always stick it in the comments. I love to learn. What I'm going to do with this colony now though, I've got a single Langstroth box, 8 frames in there. I've got my queen in there. I'm going to get my queen excluder. That's going straight on the top. And then I'm gonna get my Flow Super on there, and then later on this week I'll do some preparation on that Flow Super to hopefully try and entice the bees up into it. But there you go, we're all set in that Flow Hive now. We've got bees in it, we've got a laying queen in it. It's around kind of coming up towards the back end of May now, plenty of time for that colony to build up, get up to a really nice strong brood box, and then start to fill that Flow Super. If you want to check out some of our other Flow videos, check out this link here where we've got about 3 or 4 different Flow videos on our channel.