Honey is bees’ way of preserving their food so they have something to eat when there aren’t many flowers in bloom. Honey can be stored in the hive and consumed when needed. If bees stored nectar without turning it into honey first, it would ferment.
Want to know more about the honeybee diet? Check out our blog - What do bees eat?
Bees eat two types of food, both of which come from flowers. Pollen is their protein source, and nectar is their carbohydrate. Nectar is a sugary liquid produced by plants, with sucrose being the main sugar. Enzymes in the bees' honey stomachs break this down into the simpler sugars glucose and fructose. Honey also contains vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, and compounds from the flowers. The unique flavors, fragrances and colors of different kinds of honey depend on the type of plants the nectar comes from.
Ever wanted to harvest your own delicious honey, straight from a beehive in your backyard? With Flow Hive’s starter beehive kit, you get to experience the wonderful range of flavors created from the plants in your neighborhood.
Honey is bee food - when there’s plenty of nectar to be had, a colony will produce enough to store. During periods when there are not a lot of flowers in bloom or the bees can’t get out to forage due to bad weather, they’ll use up the stored honey. Coming up to winter, bees need to have plenty of honey stored to feed on and keep warm through the winter months. Bees will gorge on honey before swarming. This gives them the energy needed to build a new nest.
So next time you’re enjoying some tasty honey, save a thought for these industrious insects and the incredible teamwork it takes to make honey.
Check out our online course at TheBeekeeper.org. The course is full of fascinating videos about bees and is available with a 30-day free trial. And what’s more, the profits go towards protecting all pollinators, including honeybees.
If you want to start harvesting your own honey, then Flow Hive have you covered. Our revolutionary harvesting system allows you to collect honey from the hive without disturbing the bees. We stock a range of beehives, equipment and have special bundle offers that include everything you need to get started. We also offer lots of support and helpful resources for beginner beekeepers.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-behind-honeys-eternal-shelf-life-1218690/
http://www.mybeeline.co/en/p/mybeeline-honey-color-what-does-it-mean
https://honeybee.org.au/home-sweet-home/
https://bees4life.org/bee-extinction/solutions/sustainable-beekeeping/swarming
Here we’ll take a closer look at the honeybee diet.
Nectar is the main food of adult honeybees. Nectar is a sugary liquid produced by plants in special glands called nectaries. The plants produce nectar to attract bees and other pollinators. When the bees visit different flowers, they transfer pollen grains, enabling the plants to reproduce. It’s an amazing act of partnership between plants and bees!
Learn more about pollination in this amazing video from our online education platform - TheBeekeeper.org.
Honeybees collect nectar from flowers and store it in a special organ called the “honey stomach” while they carry it back to the beehive. The bees store nectar in cells, then reduce the water content until it becomes syrupy - and that’s honey!
Honey is preserved nectar, and this is what the bees feed on when there aren’t many flowers in bloom - like during long winters or droughts. For an in-depth look at the process, see our blog - How do bees make honey?
The great thing for us is that often bees make more honey than they need for themselves. That’s when beekeepers can collect some of that sweet honey to enjoy. And there’s no easier way to collect honey than with a beehive starter kit from Flow Hive.
As we mentioned above, pollen is how most plants reproduce. Tiny pollen grains transfer genetic material between plants - and honeybees are the most efficient pollinators on the planet. Honeybees also eat pollen - it’s their main protein source. They collect it in special “pollen baskets” on their legs.
These incredible structures are magnified pollen grains. (Image from The magic of pollination - TheBeekeeper.org.)
Did you know that bees make their own bread? - To do this, they pack the pollen into honeycomb cells and mix it with nectar, then they seal the cells with honey. They leave this mixture to ferment - like a good sourdough. Foraging bees can’t digest pollen directly, so this process makes the protein in pollen available to them. It’s called bee bread and is a very important food for the developing larvae.
You may have heard of royal jelly before, but maybe didn’t know what it is. This special substance is a queen-maker! Royal jelly is a white substance containing sugar, protein, and other micronutrients. Nurse bees secrete royal jelly from special glands, and then feed it to the developing larvae. Most larvae only get royal jelly for the first three days after they hatch - after that they are sustained with bee bread and honey.
But if the larva has hatched into a special cell called a queen cup, the nurse bees will exclusively feed this larva royal jelly throughout her development - and this is what triggers her to become a queen bee.
But honeybees aren’t the only type of bee around. In fact, there are about 20,000 species of bee in the world - and most of them don’t make honey or live in big colonies. Lots do eat pollen and nectar, but some species have a more varied diet. This can include floral oils, fungi, meat, other bees’ eggs, and even sweat and tears.
A few examples of beautiful bees that aren’t honeybees.
If you’ve got a beehive of your own, there are times you may need to give them extra food to make sure they stay healthy and strong when there aren’t many flowers about. Simple sugar water is the most common bee food, while pollen patties, dry sugar, and specially prepared syrups are also options.
We’ve got more info on what, when, and how to feed your bees on our support portal and YouTube channel. And if you’re looking for detailed lessons on bee nutrition, how to make feeders, and lots more, sign up for our online beekeeping course - TheBeekeeper.org.
Now that you know what bees eat, maybe you’re thinking about getting some of your own. There’s really nothing like tasting delicious honey from your backyard! A beehive starter kit from Flow Hive offers the best in honey harvesting - saving the need for messy work and extra equipment. Plus, we’ve got a wealth of resources to support new beekeepers in their new endeavor.
Not sure if keeping bees is right for you? Got more questions?
Our friendly support team is here to help.
Many of the initial criticisms have been debunked, and with over 100,000 Flow customers around the globe, the Flow Hive has been a resounding success and a revolutionary breakthrough in the world of beekeeping. Although the Flow Hive makes honey harvesting easier, this doesn’t mean that every beekeeper needs to use a Flow Hive to successfully care for their colony. Each approach to beekeeping has its unique advantages and drawbacks, and there is no universally correct way to care for bees. Beekeeping, like any craft, embraces diversity, and this diversity is its strength.
Here we’ll take a look at some of the criticisms of Flow Hives and dispel certain misconceptions. We’ll also briefly mention the advantages of Flow Hives and take a look at why they are beloved by so many beekeepers.
Conventional beekeeping methods involve the arduous process of dismantling the hive, removing frames, and extracting honey using specialized equipment. The Flow Hive eliminates this messy, sticky, labor-intensive work. There’s something thrilling every time you turn your Flow Key and watch as gorgeous honey drains straight from the hive into your jar, leaving the bees undisturbed. The Flow system makes honey harvesting easier and less stressful for both the beekeeper and the bees.
Innovation has always been at the forefront of Flow – not surprising for a company founded by an inventor who loves beekeeping! Each iteration of the Flow Hive builds on the original concept to improve and refine products based on user feedback. The built-in observation windows, pest management tray and adjustable hive stand are just a few examples of the features that set the Flow Hive apart.
The hive's built-in observation windows allow you to monitor the bees' progress without disturbing them, making it an excellent educational tool for beginners and a fascinating learning experience for kids.
One of the remarkable aspects that constantly astounds customers is the distinctive nature of each Flow Hive harvest. This uniqueness arises from this groundbreaking system that enables you to harvest honey frame by frame. This approach allows you to savor the individual flavors and subtle aromas specific to your local area. Bees forage on a wide variety of flowering plants and tend to fill cells in succession one frame at a time. This results in honeycomb frames that can look, smell and taste unique.
With Flow's patented technology, you can harvest in small, separate batches, directly into your jar. This means there's no need for the blending typical of conventional harvesting methods. As a result, you can savor the pure essence of your local environment in every jar of honey, preserving the unique qualities that set your honey apart from all others.
Flow is about more than harvesting honey in a gentle way – we’re about creating community, educating on the importance of bees, and empowering beekeepers. Bees are tiny environmental champions and we strive to follow in their footsteps by doing business in a regenerative, ethical and sustainable way.
We’re striving for a world in which pollinators are protected and celebrated for the key role they play in sustaining life on our planet. For this reason, we’re a certified B-corp, meaning we have to meet the highest verified standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and legal accountability.
We’re committed to the future of people and pollinators, and that’s why we’ve already donated over $1M AUD to projects that support and conserve pollinators. Because if we look after the bees, they’ll look after us. And the honey really is an amazing bonus!
The Flow Hive has sparked a vibrant global community of beekeepers who share their experiences, knowledge, and tips. Coupled with unrivaled educational resources and excellent customer support, this sense of community makes Flow a great choice for first-time beekeepers.
It's undeniable that the Flow Hive comes with a higher price tag compared to conventional beehives. However, this upfront investment can be balanced against the expenses associated with conventional honey extraction methods. In the conventional process, labor-intensive harvesting and the need for costly extraction equipment can add up significantly over time. In the long run, when you factor in the time, effort, and investment required for extraction equipment in a Langstroth hive, the pricing becomes quickly more comparable.
Flow technology is the first of its kind in the world. With an aim to do business in an ethical and sustainable manner with all those involved in the creation of Flow products, this is a further contributing factor to the price point.
All plastics used are of the highest quality available, and all timber is sustainably sourced, harvested, and milled, which means it is more expensive than using lower-grade, less environmentally conscious timber sources. All staff are paid fair wages and employed in fair-trade conditions.
With an aim to make these premium products as accessible as possible, there are a range of options to suit different budgets.
Some beekeepers hold strong reservations about using plastic components anywhere within beehives. Plastics have been used for many years in beehives for both brood and honeycombs and have not been found to negatively impact on bee colonies.
Foundationless brood frames are provided with all Flow Hives. This allows the bees to build their own natural brood comb structure with different cell sizes for the different types of bees.
Flow Frames are manufactured from the highest quality food-grade materials. All plastics are BPA-free, and are not manufactured with any bisphenol compounds. Third-party labs have tested this material and have found it to be free of estrogenic and androgenic activity. The bees coat the Flow Frame cells in wax before they store their honey, so the honey does not come into contact with the plastic in the Flow Frames.
Critics have raised concerns that the Flow system might tempt beekeepers to harvest honey too frequently, leaving the bees short of their own food supply. Some also contend that the ease of honey extraction will lead to lazy beekeeping, discouraging beekeepers from regularly inspecting their hives and maintaining their colonies.
It's important to understand that while the Flow Hive simplifies the honey-harvesting process, it doesn't absolve beekeepers of their responsibility to care for their bees properly. This involves ensuring that the bees have an adequate food supply, especially during periods of scarcity, conducting regular checks for diseases and pests, and adhering to best practices in beekeeping. Beekeeping is a commitment and a continuous learning experience, demanding time and effort but offering significant rewards in return.
Education and support for beekeepers have always been at the forefront of our mission. We provide a wealth of resources through our FAQs, blogs and educational videos. Cedar’s weekly Facebook Live sessions cover a range of beekeeping topics and allow you to ask questions in real time. Our community forum is a great place to swap tips and get advice from beekeepers around the world.
To provide comprehensive education, our online course at TheBeekeeper.org covers everything aspiring beekeepers need to know. With insights from leading beekeeping experts, the course starts with the basics and progressively delves into more advanced topics, equipping members with the knowledge and skills to become confident beekeepers.
Flow Frames are designed purely for the ease of harvesting honey, and as such, you cannot produce beeswax/honeycomb from these. Honey comes out of the Flow Frames free from wax and ready for use. All the wax stays in the hive and the bees reuse it. Bees use about 7kg of honey to make 1kg of wax, so this aspect of the Flow system can improve your hive’s rate of honey production.
If you are interested in collecting beeswax from your hive, the Flow Hive Hybrid is designed for those interested in collecting beeswax and enjoying the natural honeycomb experience, offering the best of both worlds. This complete hive combines Flow Frame technology with conventional timber frames in the Flow Super, enabling beekeepers to harvest both honey and honeycomb. This means you can collect beeswax from the four conventional frames within your super.
Additionally, there are a couple of options available for those using a Flow Hive 2 or a Classic model who wish to harvest honeycomb. One approach involves removing the plug from the inner cover, allowing the bees to access the roof area where they can build comb. Putting a container such as a Pyrex dish above the hole for the bees to build comb in is more convenient and less messy than harvesting from the roof cavity. Another option is to add an extra box of foundationless frames above the Flow Super, allowing you to cut the honeycomb directly from these frames.
Flow Frames offer numerous advantages for dealing with honey that is prone to crystallization:
Crystallization is a natural occurrence that can affect all types of honey, regardless of whether it's extracted using Flow or conventional methods.
All honey will eventually crystallize, usually long after harvesting. However, certain floral sources, such as rapeseed (canola), clover, ivy, and goldenrod, are more prone to crystallization within a relatively short timeframe after being capped. These types of flowers produce nectar with higher levels of glucose which is what makes the honey crystallize.
Some beekeepers opt to remove the Flow Super altogether when crystallization-prone plants are in flower. In this case, they often use conventional frames to collect the crystalizing honey, which they feed to their bees as a nutritious alternative to sugar syrup over the winter and into early spring.
Watch Jamie Oliver go into detail about harvesting rapeseed honey early to prevent crystallization in the Flow Super:
If you find yourself with crystallized honey in the Flow Frames, as per conventional hive methods you can place the frames in a warming box (kept at 40°C) where the honey will liquefy again. Alternatively, whilst the frames are still on the hive, you can disrupt the cells and cappings by opening and closing the frame with the Flow Key a couple of times, which will trigger the bees to remove the crystallized honey and repair the comb. Note that the bees need a good quality water source in order to be able to do this.
We hope this has helped clarify any concerns you might have about Flow Hives. As we’ve already mentioned, there are countless approaches to beekeeping and endless opinions on what’s best for bees. As long as beekeepers prioritize the welfare of their bees, these different methods all have their place. If you’ve got more questions about whether a Flow Hive could be right for you, contact our friendly support team today.
]]>Not sure where to move your hive to? See our tips on where to put your Flow Hive.
“Bees tend to be very geo-located to the spot their hive is in. So if you just pick up the hive and move it, the bees will come back and say - Hey, where’s my hive?’”
- Cedar Anderson, Flow Hive inventor
Suit up - Bees can become agitated when their home is moving around, and who can blame them? So it's important that you wear protective gear such as a full bee suit, including gloves and a veil when moving your hive. Even if you've sealed the hive, there's always a chance some bees could find a way out, or there may be stragglers around that won't appreciate your efforts.
Strap up – When moving a beehive, it's important to make sure it all stays together. You can secure the baseboard to the brood box using straps. For long-distance moves, we use a couple of ratchet straps to be safe. For shorter moves, a single strap should be enough.
Shut the door! Or don't – The distance you plan to travel will dictate whether or not you should seal the entrance of your beehive before moving. For moves of less than 30 feet, we recommend leaving the hive open. Anything longer and you should seal up the entrance. The best time to do this is at night, or very early in the morning while all the bees are inside the hive. This way you will avoid losing any bees that are out foraging. If there are some bees around the entrance to the hive, use your smoker to encourage them back inside gently. There's no need to blow smoke into the hive, but a few puffs around the entrance should be enough to send them inside.
When they're in, you can block up the entrance. We like to use steel wool, which can be pushed into the entrance. You can also cover the entrance with mesh, and secure it with tape or staples. Don't forget to close the roof- the Flow Hive 2 comes with a plug, if you've got the Flow Hive Classic you'll need to block the hole in the inner cover, this can be done easily with some mesh.
Keep it cool – Beehives can heat up very quickly, so ventilation is really important! When sealing your hive before moving it, always make sure that air can circulate. Flow Hives come with inbuilt ventilation control, so ensure that this is open. If you've got a screened baseboard, ventilation is taken care of. If not, you'll want to use mesh, which you can staple or tape over the entrance. Also, be careful not to leave the hive in direct sunlight for too long.
No place like home – Bees are oriented to where their hive is located. When moving a beehive, we want to ensure that the bees will get used to their new home, and not return to their original hive location. The distance you want to move your hive will determine the method you should use. If you're going more than 4 miles, then the bees won't recognize the new area and are unlikely to return to the old spot. If you're moving a shorter distance than that, you'll have to take the steps we describe below to ensure the bees can find the hive at the new location.
Don’t have bees yet, but want to get started? A beehive starter kit from Flow Hive contains everything you need to harvest honey straight from the hive.
Want to learn more about bees & beekeeping? Get started with a free trial to TheBeekeeper.org - the top-rated online education platform for beekeeping.
Need a new beehive, super, brood box or beekeeping equipment? Visit the Flow Hive online store for the best in honey-harvesting technology.
Many new beekeepers buy their first colony from a beekeeping business, but you may also be able to get bees from another hobbyist beekeeper. A good place to start your research for where to buy bees is your local bee group.
Ask around and find out where other beekeepers get their bees. Is there a reputable company nearby that sells starter colonies? Or maybe somebody in the group is planning to sell some bees. Be sure to start your research early, you may need to reserve your bees several months before spring even begins.
Before you get bees, make sure you’ve got everything you need with a starter beehive kit from Flow Hive. Featuring a beautiful beehive, safety gear and Flow’s patented honey harvesting technology. There’s no better home to welcome your new bees into.
Apiaries that sell bees often offer two different options. You can either buy a package of bees or you can buy a nucleus colony (‘nuc’ for short).
A package of bees has no comb. It’s a cluster of worker bees with a caged queen bee... it’s essentially a man-made swarm. Once you install your package of bees into your Flow Hive, they will begin to build comb and establish themselves in their new hive.
In contrast, a nuc is an already established colony with three to four frames of drawn comb already filled with brood, honey and pollen. The frames of a nuc are easily moved into a Flow Hive where the colony will continue to grow.
Most beekeepers prefer to buy nucleus colonies because they are 2-3 weeks ahead of a package colony in terms of progress, but both are viable options.
Watch this video on how to install a nuc from our Beginner Beekeeping series.
One of the most important factors to consider when buying bees is where they come from. The survival rate of your colony is closely linked to climate. If you purchase your bees locally, they will already be adapted to survive in your region. This gives you the best chance at success with your bees. If local bees are not available, try to find a beekeeper from a similar climate.
All honey bees have similar traits, but through breeding, beekeepers have brought out some subtle differences in behavior and categorized them into different breeds or races.
Many beekeepers fixate on the different breeds of bees and will purchase their bees without giving thought to much else. I could go through all the breeds, parsing out their traits and making recommendations, as many articles written before this one have—but in my opinion, too much focus is given to this subject. Even within a certain breed, each colony is truly unique, and the influences of breeding are not significant enough that a new beekeeper would even notice.
There are more important factors to consider when deciding how to populate your Flow Hive that will have a greater bearing on whether you are successful or not with your new bees.
When deciding where to buy bees, many beekeepers forget to consider the practices of the beekeeper selling them.
It’s important to find a beekeeper who keeps bees the way you plan to. This is most relevant to the issue of varroa mites. If you want to attempt treatment-free mite management, you absolutely need to buy your bees from a beekeeper who is successfully doing the same.
If you buy your bees from someone who does regular mite treatments, you should plan on continuing those treatments or your colony will most likely fail. I have seen similar issues with feeding.
If you buy your bees from a beekeeper who heavily feeds, you may find that the bees have grown accustomed to this and will need you to do the same to survive.
When buying bees, talk to the beekeeper selling them and make sure you are on the same page for whatever style of beekeeping you plan to do.
“Swarming is the bees’ way of naturally dividing the hive. So it’s an opportune moment to give them a new home.”
- Cedar Anderson, Flow Hive inventor
Although most new beekeepers fill their new hives with bees that they purchased from another beekeeper, there’s another option available for those adventurous enough to try it — catching a swarm!
In most places, swarms are active during the spring and summer season. In many ways, swarms are superior to what you can buy from a beekeeper. Not only are they free, but they are the product of a colony that is thriving in your climate! Not all swarms are created equal though.
The downside of catching a swarm is that you never quite know what you are getting. Some swarms are small and weak, some are without a queen, some have been poisoned already by the time you find them. If you live in an area with Africanized bees, swarms may become overly defensive after they establish themselves. You could also wait all season to catch a swarm and never hear of one to catch.
The safest bet is to start with two hives. Then you can order one colony from an apiary and still hope to catch a swarm for your second without the risk of ending up with no bees at all.
Watch this video from our online beekeeping course for tips on where to situate your Flow Hive.
Want more high-quality videos and beekeeping insight? TheBeekeeper.org features the world’s beekeeping experts, including Hilary Kearney and many more. It’s got everything you need to become a great beekeeper, and comes with a 30-day free trial.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her hometown of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
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This image shows a small piece of comb with one egg per cell from a queenright hive. This is what your comb should look like.
My first mistake as a new beekeeper was not recognizing that my colony had lost its queen. To my untrained eyes, everything looked like it was going well. The bees were flying in and out. They were building pristine, white combs. I spent hours watching them from the outside, peeking in through the window at them.
Then one day, it seemed like the traffic in and out of the hive was slower. They had stopped building new comb and the small cluster of bees inside seemed like it was shrinking. Without the queen there to lay eggs, there were no young worker bees to replace the ones dying of old age. I looked at the comb and found only honey and drone larvae.
I had been watching this colony slowly collapse for weeks, but I didn’t know it. There are some telltale signs though, and once you know them, you’ll be able to recognize queenlessness before it becomes too much of an issue.
Sometimes your hive may have a queen, but you still might choose to replace her. See Hillary's blog on requeening a hive for more.
The queen bee is the only bee in the hive which can lay fertilized worker bee eggs. So, when the queen is absent, eggs will be the first thing to go missing. For this reason, beekeepers should always check for eggs during inspections to confirm the presence of a queen.
A colony that has been queenless for longer will also lack larvae or capped brood. If you catch a queenless colony early, you can get them queenright before too much damage is done to the population. Remember that every day a colony is without a queen to lay eggs, worker bees are dying of old age and not being replaced.
This frame previously had a center patch of brood, which is now being filled with nectar, possibly because of queenlessness.
Watch Hillary explain how to find the queen in this video from our online education platform, TheBeekeeper.org.
In a queenless hive, worker bees who were previously occupied with the task of caring for brood will be out of the job. Without a queen there to lay eggs, there will be no more brood for them to care for. This creates a job imbalance in the hive and may result in increased foraging and food stores. If you see plenty of honey and pollen, but no brood, you may have a queenless colony on your hands.
Are you looking to expand your apiary? Flow Hive is the perfect home for bees and allows for effortless honey harvesting. And if you don’t have bees yet, there’s no better way to dive into beekeeping than with a starter beehive kit from Flow.
A queenless colony will usually attempt to make a replacement queen. Just seeing a queen cell or cup does not necessarily mean that your colony is queenless because bees will make queen cells for many different reasons, but when you see a queen cell paired with a lack of brood, that is a strong indication that your hive might be queenless.
When you see a queen cell, check to see what stage it is in. Is there a larva in it? Is it capped? Did it hatch or is it just an empty queen cup? The answers to these questions will give insight into whether or not your colony is hopelessly queenless or just raising a new queen.
This image shows hatched queen cells. A colony that has recently made a new queen may appear queenless because it goes through a period without brood while raising a new queen.
For more info and images of the different types of queen cells, see our blog on swarm prevention.
Beyond what you will find in the combs, there are other symptoms of queenlessness that may catch your attention. Bees who are queenless are often cranky and listless. They may make a high pitched whine when you open the hive. The population will also start to fall. First you will see less nurse bees, but eventually foragers will decrease in number as well.
When a queen and her brood are absent from the hive for too long, worker bees will begin to lay eggs. Once this starts, it is very difficult to get the colony queenright again. A hive with laying workers typically kills any queen you might try to install. Many beekeepers don’t even bother trying to right a laying worker colony and consider it a loss. Symptoms of a colony with laying workers includes multiple eggs per cell, a lack of worker brood and an increase of drone brood.
A queenless colony will usually have more than one of the above signs present. If you see just one, you may want to test to see if your colony really is queenless. A simple way to do this is to take a frame of young brood from another colony and put it in the hive. If the bees begin to build queen cells on it, there is a good chance your colony is queenless. You can monitor them closely and let them finish making their own queen or you can destroy the queen cells and purchase a queen to install instead.
Not sure if keeping bees is right for you? Got more questions?
Our friendly support team is here to help.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her home town of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
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Like almost all fauna and flora, honeybees have an urge to reproduce. If beekeepers don’t notice the signs and respond accordingly, honeybees will multiply naturally through swarming.
Swarming involves the queen and a percentage of the colony leaving the original hive, usually due to outgrowing their current space, to establish a new home elsewhere. It’s a great risk to the colony; doing so is a sign that they are healthy, well populated and have access to good amounts of nectar and pollen. Once colonies feel the urge to multiply, very little will stop them.
As with the majority of beekeeping, swarm mitigation is about understanding bee behavior and attempting to assist them as best you can.
There are a number of signs your colony might be preparing to swarm. These are often the reasons that they are swarming in the first place!
Signs that a colony might swarm include:
Orientation flights can very easily be mistaken for swarming. The main difference is during orientation flights, lots of bees do figures of 8 increasing in size to understand where their home is. Think of it like establishing GPS coordinates.
It can be easy to confuse bees that are doing orientation flights with bees preparing to swarm. This short video shows the difference.
Signs that a colony has decided they need to reproduce can be recognized by the presence and maturity of queen cells in the hive.
Smaller, shorter, incomplete, dummy cells don’t necessarily mean that the colony is going to swarm, unless work is continued on them. They are often made as practice queen cups by worker bees.
Made with the intention of making a queen. As these grow they begin to resemble an unshelled peanut. If an egg or larva is in the cup, then the colony is preparing to make a queen. It takes approximately 16 days for a queen to emerge, from the day the egg laid.
Queen cup with a larva.
Also known as a swarm cell, this is a queen cup but the bottom of it is sealed, meaning the larva has been fed and is now in the pupating stage. Bees often make lots of swarm cells (average of 12) which are present throughout the whole hive.
Looks similar to a queen cell, it's a colony's natural way of replacing a queen because—in their eyes—she is ‘failing’ (e.g. poor laying pattern, pheromone is weak). Supersedure cells are usually situated around the middle of the brood frame, compared to swarm cells (usually along the bottom of the brood frames). Supersedure cells are usually close together, only a few are made (3 - 4) and are similar in size because the larvae are the same age.
If you find swarm cells in your hive, the colony has decided to swarm and there is little you can do about it, apart from splitting the hive.
If you find a queen cell with a rough opening at the bottom, this is a sign that a queen has already emerged from that cell. Looking at where it’s situated on the frame, the population of the colony and amount of resources can help determine if it was a supersedure or swarm cell.
Some beekeepers mark their queen, so they know if they have been replaced.
A queen has hatched from this cell.
If your colony swarms, it often won’t go far. This can be a great opportunity to start a new colony. See our tips on how to catch a swarm and be prepared with a Flow swarm kit.
There are three different types of swarms: primary swarms, secondary or after-swarms, and absconding swarms.
Usually the first swarm of the season. It involves the original queen leaving with about half of the colony and some drones. These are often larger in size.
These occur after the primary swarm, meaning they’re usually a lot smaller, sometimes leaving with one or more virgin queens soon after the primary swarm has left. Colonies that frequently swarm are often re-queened, because this tendency can be influenced by genetics. Older queens have a tendency to swarm more frequently, which is why some beekeepers replace their queens every few seasons.
This is when the entire colony leaves the hive for a variety of reasons, including wrong climate, starvation due to a lack of resources, but most commonly due to being infested by pests and diseases which have made their space uninhabitable.
Want more info on swarming and all things beekeeping? TheBeekeeper.org is our online education platform - featuring the world’s beekeeping experts and with hundreds of 5-star reviews from our users, it’s an unrivalled resource for beekeepers of all levels.
While honeybees' urge to multiply is natural, letting your bees get to this point is not considered good practice because it poses a risk to the public, your bees, other beekeepers, and honey bee biosecurity in your country.
When a colony swarms, it will settle within 50m of the hive while scout bees search for a new home.
Swarming should not be thought about in terms of prevention but mitigation.
It’s important to identify the signs and implement the necessary practices before it occurs.
Splitting the hive is the most common swarm mitigation practice, however there are a number of methods to delay the time before a colony needs to be split. All of the methods revolve around the creation of space and work opportunities for the bees. Being a super-organism where every member has a role to play it’s important that there’s work available for all bees at every stage of their life.
Colonies develop at different rates depending on the climate, foraging opportunities and genetics. While some colonies exhibit swarming tendencies within the first season, others colonies can take years. At some point all healthy colonies will need to multiply.
Splitting a hive is a great opportunity to expand your own apiary or welcome someone else into the wonderful world of beekeeping. If you have a number of hives, you’ll probably already have noticed that beekeeping is a bit addictive in that you say you only want 2 hives, but 2 ends up being 4, which is soon 7… You get it :)
Using a De-maree board to get two colonies out of what looks like one, is a method used by lots of beekeepers in residential areas.
Removing swarm cells won’t eliminate honey bees' urge to multiply, but can be used as a way to delay swarming. If doing this, you have to be very diligent and continue removing the cells, being sure not to miss a single one, because the bees will just keep making them.
Like removing queen cells, placing a queen excluder at the bottom of the brood box or along the entrance won’t prevent, nor stop, a colony’s urge to swarm, but can similarly give you some time to perform a split soon.
A swarm leaves with the original queen often meaning that she has mated and her abdomen is too big to fit through a queen excluder. Even though bees starve the queen a couple of days before preparing to swarm so that she is lighter and can fly, she often still isn’t small enough to fit through the excluder.
In this circumstance you will see the bees leaving the hive thinking they’re going to swarm, at some point realize the queen is absent and so fly back home.
Eventually, the colony will learn to leave with a virgin queen (or sometimes numerous) because they’re still small enough to get through the excluder. Colonies also respond like this to queens whose beekeeper has clipped their wings.
Despite often creating confusion, one of the most beautiful parts of beekeeping is that there are always numerous methods and views on just about every topic. The actions you choose to undertake are influenced by your climate and preferred beekeeping practices.
While many elements of beekeeping can be grey, honeybee’s processes, particularly regarding swarming, is very specific. The better an understanding you have of their life-cycle, behavior, signs being exhibited and their meaning, the better equipped you are to engage with and support this super-organism.
If you plan to split your hive to prevent swarming, or want to be prepared to catch a swarm, Flow Hive offers the very best in honey harvesting technology. Perfect for experienced beekeepers and beginners, with friendly and knowledgeable customer support.
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A hive split is a way to make a new honeybee colony from an existing one.
If you have a large, healthy hive, it is possible to create a new colony from it by making what is called a split. The basic concept of making a split is that you take a portion of an established colony and transfer it to a separate hive, thereby creating two colonies. The end goal is to have two colonies, each with sufficient worker bee populations, stores and their own queen.
Before splitting your colony, make sure it is healthy and large enough to do so. It’s usually not a good idea to split a first-year colony. Splits should be made from overwintered colonies in the spring when there will be plenty of forage and time for them to recover. Most splits are what you call an “even split”, meaning you will halve the colony, dividing the number of brood combs and honey evenly between the two hives.
This is an example of a good brood frame to move into your new colony. These capped worker bees will soon hatch into nurses.
There are many reasons for making a split. Some beekeepers make splits to increase their apiary or to sell to other beekeepers. Others use splits as a form of swarm control, mite control or to reduce the size of a large colony. The size of the split you make should be determined by your reason for making it. For example, a beekeeper who wants to sell off some colonies will typically make much smaller splits, more accurately called nucs or starter colonies. That way, they don’t weaken their existing colonies too much and they can make a higher number of nucs. A small split should be no smaller than 3 frames of brood comb and ideally it would have 1 additional frame of honey plus extra nurse bees shaken in. If you make your split too small, it will fail.
For a step-by-step video guide on how to split a hive, watch this video from the Flow YouTube channel:
To start, set up your new equipment and begin to transfer the frames over. The new half of the split will always have fewer bees in it. This puts it at a disadvantage, but two things can be done to bolster it. First, when selecting brood to transfer, make sure you take plenty of capped brood. This brood will hatch soon and help to increase the new colony’s population. Second, make sure to shake in some extra nurse bees. You can do this by locating frames with open brood, they will have the most nurse bees, then hold them over your split and give a sharp shake so that the nurse bees fall into your new hive.
Hilary making a split: moving frames from the original hive to a new box.
When making a split, you have to also consider the problem of drift. Drift refers to foragers who will return to the location of the original hive. If you make a split and leave it in the same yard, you should expect all the workers who can fly to return to the original hive. This can often result in a failed split because the new colony will end up with too few bees. You can address the problem of drift in three ways:
It’s a good idea to monitor your splits closely in the days following their creation. Make sure each has enough adult bees to care for the brood you have given them and take action if they do not.
For in-depth lessons on splitting a hive, including other methods known as the vertical split and the horizontal split, check out TheBeekeeeper.org. Featuring beekeeping experts from around the world, it’s an unrivaled source of beekeeping wisdom. Try it out with a 30-day free trial.
The next to consider is the queen. When making a split, you can either let the bees raise their own queen or introduce a caged queen. Introducing a caged queen will save your new split valuable time. It can take about 3 weeks for a new queen to develop, mate and begin laying eggs. However, letting your bees raise their own queen will save you money and will help to propagate the strong genes of your original colony. Keep in mind that if you are in an Africanized Honey Bee Zone, letting your bees raise their own queen may result in an increase in defensiveness in your colony. If you are making a split for the purpose of mite control, the brood break is what you are after so, you probably want to let your bees raise their own queen or delay installation of a caged queen.
Planning to split your beehive? Flow Hive offers the very best in honey harvesting technology. We also stock high-quality brood boxes, Flow supers, and beekeeping gear.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her home town of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
]]>We’re big believers in keeping more than one hive. There’s no need to begin with a lot of hives, but as your beekeeping knowledge and passion grows, your apiary is likely to expand naturally. While it may seem a bit daunting as a new beekeeper, starting out with two hives has a lot of advantages over keeping a single colony.
Every honeybee colony is different. If you start your beekeeping journey with one hive, you may get a sense that what happens with that first colony is normal or standard behavior for bees. Having a second hive enables you to compare and contrast what is happening in both hives. This rapidly increases the amount you can learn in your first seasons as a beekeeper.
While you can learn significantly more by keeping a second hive, it doesn’t necessarily mean significantly more work beekeeping work. If you’re conducting a brood inspection on a single hive, you’ll need to suit up and get your smoker going. If you’re inspecting one hive, it’s not such a big job to then check another one on the same day.
If you have more than one hive, you’ll get a sense more quickly of when something is wrong with a colony. If you notice that one colony is growing quickly and storing lots of honey while the other has low numbers or is not storing honey, that gives an indication that the weaker colony might have an issue. If on the other hand, neither colony is storing much honey, it’s more likely that local conditions might not be great at the time and there’s not a good nectar flow on.
As with any agricultural activity, beekeeping is subject to peaks and troughs in production, good seasons and bad. One year could yield multiple harvests, while during another you might not get to harvest at all. Equally, one hive could produce a lot more honey during a season than another.
If one of your colonies has a disease issue, low numbers or needs to be requeened during a nectar flow, you probably won’t get to harvest any honey from that hive. Having a second hive means that you’ve got a much better chance of still getting a harvest and not missing the season completely.
One of the major benefits of having more than one hive is that it allows you to share resources between colonies. This is really useful if one colony is struggling. You can swap frames of brood from a strong colony into a weaker colony to help boost the numbers in the struggling hive.
In some cases, you can even merge two weak colonies to make one stronger colony. This could be a good option if you’re worried about smaller colonies surviving the winter, or to take advantage of a heavy nectar flow.
We’ve got more details on this topic at TheBeekeeper.org.
Another reason you might want to transfer frames from one hive to another is for swarm management. A lack of space in the hive is a trigger for swarming, so if a colony shows signs that it is preparing to swarm, you can give them more space in the brood box. If you transfer some brood frames to another hive, it can help reduce the likelihood of the colony swarming.
If one of your colonies needs to be requeened, it’s really useful to have another colony. You can take a brood frame with eggs from your queenright hive and place it in the queenless brood box. The bees will then raise a queen by feeding royal jelly to the young larvae.
So there’s a few reasons why it’s a good idea to have more than a single hive in your apiary. You can check out our range of hives here.
Bees bearding at a hive entrance.
Bearding bees can often be confused for a hive preparing to swarm, however, bearding bees look slightly different to a hive about to swarm. Swarming bees are looking for a new home, while bearding bees are trying to keep their hive at optimal temperature.
Bees often beard in the evening, when all the forager bees have returned to the hive, while swarming is more common earlier in the day. There will be a lot more flight activity with bees preparing to swarm than with bearding bees, who will mostly remain on the hive.
It can be easy to confuse bees that are doing orientation flights with bees preparing to swarm. This short video shows the difference.
For more on this topic, see our blog on swarm prevention. If you plan to split your hive to prevent swarming, Flow Hive offers the very best in honey harvesting technology.
Here are some differences between bearding bees and swarm preparations:
Watch as Cedar answers a question about bearding in this Q&A:
Bearding is normal bee behavior. If you have concerns and feel unsure about whether your hive is simply bearding or preparing to swarm, we recommend getting in touch with a local beekeeping mentor, or beekeeping club, or ask the friendly Flow community forum.
For more detailed lessons on everything beekeeping, check out TheBeekeeper.org - our online education platform.
If you want to get bees of your own, then Flow Hive has you covered. Collect delicious honey from your own backyard without disturbing the bees. Check out our starter beehive kit for a special offer that includes everything you need to get up and running.
It's a good idea to connect with local beekeepers to understand specific overwintering practices for your area. It is helpful to source bees that are adapted to your region so that their biological reproductive rhythm is suited to the typical climatic conditions in your area.
How well a colony will survive through winter in cold climates depends largely upon:
Towards the end of the summer, the colony will stop producing foraging bees, and instead produce fat winter bees. These live longer than foragers, and their larger bodies help to generate heat and insulate the brood and the queen throughout the winter months.
You need to be sure your hive is queened right coming into fall/autumn. If there are at least 10 bees per minute arriving back to the hive with pollen, it’s usually a good sign that your queen is laying. If in doubt, you may need to inspect the hive.
The bees will form a cluster, and start at the bottom of the hive. As the season progresses, they will gradually move upwards, feeding on the honey stores from the bottom up. They will typically advance 1mm per day.
You will need a large cluster of bees in your brood box going into winter, spanning over several frames and about the size of a soccer ball. The cluster needs to be big enough to generate sufficient heat to keep the brood warm throughout winter. The bees will maintain a brood temperature of 94 to 97℉ (34 -36℃ ).
In the depths of winter, the colony’s metabolism slows down and they can go into a state of torpor - a bit like hibernation. Once temperatures increase and they fly out, they will immediately eliminate the waste that they’ve been storing in their bodies.
In cold climates, it’s usually best to use two brood boxes. Either one deep box and one medium, or two deeps. Set up your hive accordingly during spring. Consult with local beekeepers on how much a colony typically requires to get through winter in your area.
You don’t want to have excess space in the hive, as it will require more energy for the bees to keep warm. If you have harvested honey from a super, remove the super and allow the bees to clean off any excess honey. Flow Frames should be drained of honey and wrapped in plastic for storage. You can leave the super in an unheated storage shed for the winter.
After the super has been removed, you should be left with a deep brood box at the base, and a medium or deep super or brood box on top. The bottom brood box should have brood in the center, followed by pollen, with honey stores at the edges. The box on top will only be for honey.
A sugar feeder at the top of the hive can help the bees last through winter if they’ve exhausted their honey stores. Ideally, the emergency feed should be installed before winter so that you don’t need to open the top cover when it’s cold. Fred prefers feeding dry sugar in winter, rather than syrup.
Fred recommends not having any ventilation at the top of the hive (eg: an open-top entrance). This can create a draft, causing the heat generated by the cluster to escape. There should be ventilation at the base of the hive for oxygen to enter and CO2 to be expelled. The bees will also need to be able to leave and enter the hive when the weather is warm enough for them to fly. An entrance reducer or a mouse guard can help to reduce drafts and keep intruders out of the hive.
During winter, it’s not uncommon to see a number of dead bees and the landing board, and sometimes close to the front of the hive. You may need to clear dead bees from the entrance occasionally to make sure it doesn’t get blocked.
You can add insulation to the top cover. Polystyrene or wood shavings can be used for this. You can also wrap the hive with extra insulation. The outside of the hive should be well sealed and waterproof. You may want to strap your hives down in case of high winds. If a beehive gets covered in snow, check the entrance for holes and pathways. The bees will usually maintain pathways out of the hive to allow airflow, while the snow provides extra insulation for the hive.
Don’t open the hive during a cold winter! This risks chilling the brood and killing your colony.
You can check the position of the cluster by listening with a stethoscope, tapping gently on the side of the hive to hear the cluster buzz, or by using a thermal camera. The closer the bees are to the top of the hive, the less honey they have left.
Want to learn more? This video is taken from our online beekeeping course - TheBeekeeper.org. Check it out for lessons on all aspects of beekeeping from the world’s experts.
Got more overwintering questions, or tips to share? Our Flow Forum is a great place to connect with other beekeepers and benefit from each other’s experience.]]>Honey bees swarm in spring when their colony grows large and overcrowded with bees. It is their way of relieving congestion of the colony and it is also how their species creates new bee colonies. When it is time to swarm, the queen and roughly half the bees leave the colony in search of a new place to live. Swarms often take breaks on their journey to their new home and may be found resting in a tree or bush.
Swarms are easy for beekeepers to catch and relocate because, at this stage, they seldom have comb. A true swarm has not settled in its new home and so they will not have started to build. They are just a cluster of bees. Without the complication of comb, a beekeeper can easily scoop, shake or lower the swarm into their equipment and bring them back to their apiary.
See our swarm prevention tips to help manage swarming in your colonies.
The best time to catch a swarm is as soon as you find out about them. A swarm of bees is, by definition, unsettled and will not stay put for long. A swarm may rest in one location for only an hour or they may stay for several days, but the beekeeper has no way of knowing which it will be.
I’ve often rushed out to capture a swarm only to have it leave in the short window of time it took me to get there. During the swarm season, I like to keep everything I need to catch a swarm in my car. That way I can get to them more quickly.
Capturing a swarm of bees is magical. No matter how many I catch, I am still filled with childlike glee when they start to swirl around me. One of the things that make the process so enjoyable is that swarms are almost always docile.
Established colonies tend to be defensive. They may sting to protect their home, their brood, and their honey, but a swarm of bees has no home, brood or honey stores. Therefore, they have no reason to sting. It is also said that swarms are less likely to sting because they are full of honey. Each worker carries a small amount of honey inside her honey gut. This honey will help to fuel the work of building a new hive.
It should be noted that on occasion, a swarm will be defensive. Many beekeepers catch swarms without wearing bee suits, but new beekeepers especially should beware of this possibility.
It should also be noted that while most swarms will start out sweet, they will almost certainly become more defensive once they become established. If you are in an Africanized area, this change can be dramatic. Initially, there is no way to tell if you are catching an Africanized swarm or not. It can take several weeks before the bees reveal their true nature.
The main thing you need for catching a swarm is something to put them in. When selecting a container, make sure you have something big enough to accommodate the size of the swarm you are catching. The size of each swarm can vary from something as small as a baseball to something as big as a couple of basketballs. I find most swarms are about the size of a football. Your container can be anything: a cardboard box, a bucket, a plastic container, a nuc box or you can put them directly into your Flow Hive.
If you do decide to transfer them directly into your Flow Hive, you need only bring the brood box with you. There is no need to bring the Flow super, you can add it later once your swarm has started to build comb and fill the first box. I also like to leave the Flow Hive peaked roof at home when catching a swarm. The hive is easier to manage during transport with just the inner cover. I tape a piece of screen or paper over the hole. If you do use a bucket or cardboard box, just know you will need to transfer the bees a second time into your Flow Hive once you get home. If you can put them directly into their permanent home during the catching process, this will save you and the bees some time and effort!
You’ll need a new home for the bees - this can be a brood box or a smaller nuc box to let them get established. We’ve put together a swarm kit so you can be prepared.
Depending on where the swarm has landed you may need a few other things for catching them. If they are up high, you may need a ladder, or to use a long pole. If they are deep in a shrub, you may need some plant clippers. If you haven’t seen the swarm in person, make sure you ask about the position of the swarm so you can arrive prepared.
Check out our blog with great videos on How to catch a swarm high in a tree.
So, how do you actually get the bees into your container or Flow Hive? There are three simple methods, but the best option can vary depending on the specific situation.
Generally, the best way to get a swarm in your box is to lower them in. This scenario is usually possible when the bees are hanging from a small branch. You simply clip (cut) the branch and lower it into your brood box. Make sure to leave the frames in and place the swarm on top of them. They will run down and hang from the tops of the frames. If you put the bees in first and then try to put the frames in afterwards, you will have trouble doing it without squishing bees!
Lowering the bees into the box means virtually none of the bees will be separated from the swarm. A few will fly, but most will stay in formation and then regroup in your box. Some believe this method also makes the bees feel like they have chosen to move, which increases the likelihood that they will stay in your Flow Hive.
If the bees are on a branch that is out of reach or too thick to cut, you can shake them. This method is quick and if your aim is good, it is effective. Just give the branch a single, strong shake and the cluster will fall in a big clump into your box. The downside of this method is that many of the bees will fly and become confused. Some will return to the branch you shook them from, others will land nearby. Basically, bees will go everywhere and it will take more time for them to regroup in your box. However, the majority of them – and probably the queen – will end up in your box.
When the bees are on something that prevents them from being lowered or shaken, they can usually be scooped by hand. Some even prefer this over shaking because it’s easier to keep the bees from flying. Once you scoop several handfuls, the bees will start to move of their own accord into the box. If they don’t, just keep scooping.
When the bees start excitedly streaming into the box and fanning at the entrance there’s a good chance that you got the queen or that they have decided to move into the box and the queen will follow. If the bees exhibit this behavior in a location that is not your box, do some investigating because you might find the queen there!
Once you’ve got most of the bees into your box, you’ll need to position it in a way that makes it accessible to the remaining bees. The flying bees will return to the original location of the swarm so you will want to place your box as close to the original location as possible. Then you wait. If possible, wait until dusk to close the box and move the bees away. This will ensure that all of the foragers are back and no bee is left behind. If you must take it in the middle of the day, many bees will be left behind.
After catching your new swarm, it is important not to disturb them for one week. This is the amount of time it will take them to build comb and start raising brood. If you bother them before that point, they may become annoyed and decide to abscond. Remember, they have nothing invested in your hive at this point. No comb, honey or brood!
In fact, swarms often abscond even when they haven’t been disturbed! Some tricks for getting them to stay include: using a hive that bees have lived in before, tacking a queen excluder over the entrance, giving the bees some empty comb, or best of all giving the bees some open brood comb from another hive.
You may also want to check out our other great video on How to catch a swarm of bees.
If you want to be prepared for swarming season with extra brood boxes, accessories, or a full hive setup, then Flow Hive has you covered. Our revolutionary harvesting system allows you to collect honey from the hive without disturbing the bees.
And if you’re new to beekeeping, check out our starter beehive kit for a special offer that includes everything you need to get up and running. We also offer lots of support and helpful resources for beginner beekeepers.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her hometown of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
But if the swarm you’ve found is high up in a tree, things get a little more complicated. Accessing the swarm isn’t so easy and mucking about with a ladder could be risky. A handy trick to catch an inaccessible swarm is to use a long pole. Attach a container (maybe a bucket or a box) to your pole and shake the swarm into it.
Want to see how Cedar pulls off this high-flying swarm catch? Check out the video!
@flowhive_official Watch me catch a swarm of bees! I saw this one above my ute so I quickly got Bija to film the action 🐝 #swarmcatch #bees #flowhive ♬ original sound - Flow Hive
You’ll need a new home for the bees - this can be a brood box or a smaller nuc box to let them get established. We’ve put together a swarm kit so you can be prepared (the pole’s not included 😉).
Watch our latest member of the hive Sophie catch her very first swarm! Cedar talks through why bees swarm, catching the swarm, and building the swarm kit. This one isn't as high, but it still needs a ladder to reach!
@flowhive_official A day at the office beekeeping style 😊 ... some extreme swarm catching fun with Pete and Jai 🐝🐝🐝
♬ original sound - Flow Hive
If you don’t want a new colony of your own, give it to another beekeeper who wants to boost their apiary. So bee prepared for this swarming season. Happy beekeeping!
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Most of our native bees are solitary, and many of them make their nests in hollow plant stems. That’s where the Flow Pollinator House comes in. It's tailor-made to mimic the cavities these vital pollinators use in the wild, giving them a cozy spot to call home. With one of these in your garden, you'll provide a safe haven for beautiful native species, including mason bees and leafcutter bees, to raise their young. Some species are also on the lookout for sheltered spaces with plant matter where they can comfortably hibernate over winter.
Some of our native bees have a small range when compared to honeybees, perhaps just a few hundred yards. By creating habitat, we give these pollinators stepping stones through the urban landscape, building insect highways between our wild spaces. If we can give them enough homes, we can bring back some of these important species from the brink of extinction.
But that’s not all. The Flow Pollinator House isn't just a cool home for our native bee buddies. It's also a feel-good purchase because 100% of the profits go to grassroots organizations working to promote pollinator protection. And because we've crafted these bee havens from upcycled Flow Hive offcuts, it reduces our environmental impact. An eco-friendly product that helps our native insects thrive and also funds their protection - it's like a triple win!
But that’s not the only way you can help the bees. There are plenty of ways you can entice native bees and other insects into your garden. Leave some wild spaces, unmowed grass, bare soil patches, and holes in the mud – all perfect for providing native bees with nesting spots. Cut out pesticides and keep a variety of flowering plants around all year long to keep them happily fed. Check out this handy guide on creating a bee-friendly garden for more inspiration!
The pollinator house isn’t just a present for the native bees who’ll be calling it home - it also makes the perfect gift for eco-conscious loved ones. It’s easy to assemble and can make a fun family project. Get creative by painting your designs on the walls. It's also an awesome chance to educate the kids and curious adults in your life about the incredible world of native bees.
We’ve put together the Pollinator Booster Bundle, including the Flow Pollinator House and Flow Garden Tools. It’s a wonderful way to boost your pollination impact and make a saving along the way.
Native bees are essential parts of our ecosystem - so every little bit we can do to give them a helping hand is a step in the right direction. Get your garden buzzing with life and invite some bee buddies around.
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Regular monitoring is essential in understanding when it’s necessary to apply control methods and evaluating the success of a treatment. There will usually be a threshold number of mites per bee at which treatment is recommended, and this may vary from place to place. See our guide to monitoring here.
There are a number of issues to consider when choosing when to treat against varroa, and what control to implement. In temperate climates, it’s often recommended to treat for mites in spring to help the bees through their busiest period, and again in the autumn after the last honey flow. Varroa numbers should be low coming into winter in order to increase colonies’ survival chances. Treating all the hives in an apiary simultaneously and coordinating treatment with other beekeepers in the area helps to reduce the chances of the mites quickly reinfecting treated hives.
Beekeepers also need to consider factors such as the cost of treatments, how a treatment or combination of them might affect the colony’s health and genetics, residues in hives and honey from chemicals, mites developing resistance to certain treatments, and the regulations that apply in specific regions. Using a mixture of approaches to management is often the best way to minimise the chance of mites developing resistance to any one particular treatment.
Integrated Pest Management is an approach that aims to avoid harm, reduce pesticide use and maintain the health of your bees. When using this approach to combat varroa, beekeepers try to reduce mite numbers primarily through cultural and mechanical controls. When chemical treatments are needed, ‘softer’ chemicals derived from natural sources are given preference, with synthetic treatments only applied versus high infestation rates.
Certain honeybees have genetic resistance to varroa mites. This can come about as a result of natural selection or selective breeding. Bees with varroa resistance have behaviours that limit mites’ reproduction, including uncapping and recapping brood cells, increased grooming, and mite-biting.
Using bees that have varroa-resistant traits can help to reduce the amount of chemical treatments needed. In South and Central America, miticides have not been widely used, and the honeybees there are believed to have greater genetic resistance to mites when compared with North American bees.
Flow has provided support for Corinne Jordan’s program to breed for varroa resistance in Australian bees using Dr Kaira Wagoner’s innovative UBO technology.
Cultural controls are techniques that reduce the mites’ reproduction.
A brood break or brood interruption occurs when the queen is not laying eggs and can disrupt the mite’s life cycle by reducing the number of available brood cells for mite reproduction. Putting the queen in a cage for 2-3 weeks provides a brood break. When requeening, a brood break can be done by delaying the introduction of the new queen for a couple of weeks. Beekeepers will sometimes use this time as an opportunity to also apply a chemical treatment if necessary, and/or use drone frames to trap mites (see below).
If using foundation in your hives, you can choose to provide a smaller-sized cell comb (4.9 mm), as opposed to regular-sized cells (5.2-5.4 mm). Smaller cell comb is said to reduce the mite load as there is less space for them to reproduce, and the post-capping period is shorter, giving mites less time to reproduce.
Mechanical controls are methods that involve physically removing mites from the hive.
Mites preferentially reproduce in drone brood. Mite trapping entails adding foundation frames of drone comb to the hive as bait. Mites will preferentially lay in the drone cells which can then be culled when the larvae are 14-23 days old. The drone larvae and mites are destroyed by scraping the comb into a bin or freezing the frame. An advantage of freezing is that when you replace the frame, the bees can remove the dead drones and reuse the comb.
Using a screened bottom ensures that any mites that fall off the bees will fall out of the hive.
Some beekeepers sprinkle powdered sugar over their hive on a regular basis, in a method similar to the sugar shake used for monitoring. The sugar coating induces grooming which can dislodge mites and may help to keep mite numbers down.
While cultural and mechanical controls can be effective in suppressing mite reproduction and keeping their numbers down, there are times when chemical treatments may be necessary. If chemical controls are used, the least toxic options should be used first, with more toxic methods utilised only as a last resort.
NB: Certain chemical treatments are prohibited or restricted in some regions. Make sure to check your local regulations before applying any chemical treatments. Only use as indicated and follow all label directions and safety precautions.
Soft chemicals are derived from natural substances, they are not persistent and they do not contaminate wax or honey over the long term. These include thymol, formic acid, oxalic acid, and hop-beta acids. Soft chemicals have not been shown to negatively affect bee health, and mites have not built up resistance to these products in the same way as they have to some hard chemical treatments.
The effectiveness of these treatments can vary greatly depending on factors such as environmental conditions, time of application, method of application, and frequency of use. Some can be harmful to humans in very high concentrations.
Hard chemicals are synthetic miticides and have been widely used against varroa mites in Europe and North America. They include: Flumethrin (Bayvarol), Tau-fluvalinate, Coumaphos, and Amitraz. These chemicals can be highly effective against mites when used correctly.
Varroa mites can quickly develop resistance to hard chemicals. The compounds can also accumulate in wax and honey, which can negatively impact bee health. Beekeepers often remove their honey supers before using hard chemicals. If applying hard chemical treatments, it’s often recommended to rotate different chemicals to reduce the chances of resistance developing.
The good news is that helping your bees combat the mites involves getting to know your bees better and improving your beekeeping skills. The steps we recommend are to become more familiar with your bees, follow good beekeeping practices, monitor for mites regularly, and apply control methods or treatments when necessary.
Strong and healthy bees are the best defense against most honeybee pests and diseases. Luckily bees do most of the work, but as a beekeeper, one of the most important things you can do to help is to know your bees well and keep track of changes within your colonies. A weak colony is at a higher risk of parasites like varroa. Likewise, having a lot of mites in your colony makes your bees more vulnerable to other pests and ailments.
Regular brood inspections are the best way to get familiar with your bees. Make varroa monitoring a part of your inspection routine and keep records to track changes in your colonies over time.
Varroa mite on a bee
The more you learn about your bees and get to know them better, the better you’ll be at spotting when they need a helping hand. A weak hive may require feeding, a suitable water source, drier conditions, extra ventilation, or even a new queen. If you’re unsure of something, get advice from more experienced beekeepers. Check out the support articles and educational resources on our website for extra info.
Remember that your bees affect the health of your neighbors’ bees too. Diseases and parasites can be spread through drifting, robbing, and swarming, so it’s a good idea to talk to other beekeepers to keep abreast of issues affecting bees in your area.
Good hygiene is really important to stop the spread of any diseases between hives or other apiaries. Keep your beekeeping equipment and clothes clean if working on more than one hive, and be careful if buying second-hand equipment.
To dive deeper into the world of bee health, check out our beekeeping blogs, pests and diseases section, and our online beekeeping course. There's a hive of information waiting for you.
There are a few different methods you can use to monitor your colonies for varroa mites. These can be incorporated into your regular brood inspections.
Varroa mites on a developing bee larva
Beekeepers have a number of ways to help keep varroa mite numbers in check. Some of these are preventative techniques, like providing a brood break, uncapping drone brood, or introducing varroa-resistant genes into your colonies. If the mite levels get too high, it can call for stronger treatments. A combination of different tactics is advisable, depending on the advice for your region and your own requirements.
See our article on How beekeepers around the world manage varroa for more details on treatment methods.
There’s much more to beekeeping than just harvesting honey. Flow Hive beekeeper Hilary Kearney looks at what newbees should do when their Flow Hive arrives.
Once word gets out that you are keeping bees, everyone you know will begin to pester you about honey. This is because of the misconception that a beehive is made entirely of honeycomb.
Outsiders envisage a shining palace of honey from which honey flows effortlessly. Of course, with the advent of the Flow Hive, this particular function is now possible! However, it’s important to understand how much work goes into the production of honey prior to it being in sufficient amounts and ready to harvest.
Before the bees can make honey, they must build comb, raise young and visit a whole lot of flowers! As beekeepers, it’s our job to foster and monitor their progress.
In beekeeping, like with any animal husbandry, there’s a lot of learning to do but here's some of the basics to help you get started.
A beehive is made up of more than honey. The bees build hexagonal beeswax structures called combs and they are used to house both honey and developing bees (brood).
Building new combs requires tremendous energy and is fuelled by pollen and honey consumption.
There’s a lot of variation depending on where the hive is situated, but for many, tapping pounds and pounds of honey right away is not a realistic expectation. In their first year, bees will spend a significant amount of their honey on drawing out combs and these combs will make up their brood nest.
Bees build their brood nest in the bottom box of a Flow Hive or other Langstroth set-up. The brood is critical for the survival and health of your colony. Without constant regeneration, the hive will falter and fail as its population ages.
The brood nest is the very first thing your bees create. Even before the worker bees finish building their first piece of comb, the queen will begin to lay eggs in it. In most places, flowers are only available during a short window of time. The bees must build up their infrastructure and workforce quickly if they wish to capitalise on this fleeting resource. Only after they have established their brood nest will they begin to store honey in large amounts.
It is common for there to be a strip of capped honey at the top of each frame in the brood nest and sometimes a full frame of honey on either end. The honey is stored this way because the bees are using it to insulate their brood nest. Any honey you find in your brood nest should be left alone for this reason.
Since bees will need time to establish their brood nest and they cannot begin to store harvestable honey until they do this, you should install your new bees in just a single box.
For Flow Hive beekeepers, this means you should leave your Flow Super in the garage until your bees have filled their brood box. Bees like to stay a warm and cozy 95 degrees Fahrenheit (35 degrees Celsius) inside their cluster. When you give them more space than necessary they have to work much harder to maintain these conditions and the energy they expend doing so may result in less honey stores — not to mention stressed out bees!
After your bees have filled their first box with brood, you have the choice of adding another brood box or adding your Flow Super. Although you may be eager to see your Flow Super in action, adding a second brood box will make for a stronger and more stable colony. The second brood box often contains more honey than brood, but will fluctuate based on your colony’s needs. It gives your bees the flexibility to expand and contract their population as needed and this may result in better honey yields in the long term.
If you are installing a nucleus ‘nuc’ colony, make sure you transfer the frames in the original order. It doesn’t matter whether you put them in the middle of the box or to one side as long as you do not interrupt the sequence with empty frames. The drawn frames must be next to each other in order for the bees to cluster and maintain their core temperature.
If you are installing a package of bees your colony will not have comb, so you don’t have to worry about how to order it. Just hang your queen cage from the centre frame, shake the bees in, put on the roof and leave them alone for one week. If you disturb a newly installed package before they have had adequate time to start their brood nest, they may abscond from your hive. After one week they will have begun to raise larvae. Even if you do annoy them at this point, they won’t want to abandon their young.
When the bees begin to use the super, they will fill the centre frames first and expand outward. So, by the time you see honey through the windows, your super is close to full. How full the frames are with capped cells full of honey is the only information you will need to gather in the honey super. The same cannot be said of the brood nest. There is a myriad of vital information to collect from an inspection of your colony’s brood and it cannot be done by peeking through a window.
There are many different approaches to beekeeping which have bearing on when inspections are performed. I recommend that new beekeepers inspect more frequently (once every 2-4 weeks) because it aids the learning process and prevents cross-comb. Once a colony is established and the beekeeper seasoned, it can be beneficial to inspect less often as frequent disruption causes stress. When inspecting the brood some basics you should look for include:
Learning how to properly inspect your hives will take time and effort. If possible, you should seek guidance through local classes, beekeeping groups or by seeking out a mentor.
Watch our Meet The Beekeeper Series to see the stories of people just like you keeping bees with a Flow Hive.
Find the Flow Hive that suits you.
Join the Flow Community to meet and learn from beekeepers around the world.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her home town of epers each year. Her beekeeping exploits and unique business model have inspired people all around the world. She is the author of the beekeeping blog Beekeeping Like A Girl and maintains a popular Instagram account. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her sixty colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
Website: www.girlnextdoorhoney.com
Blog: www.beekeepinglikeagirl.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/girlnextdoorhoney/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GirlNextDoorHoney/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GNDHoney
The views expressed here are the beekeeper’s own and not necessarily endorsed by Flow. Every hive is different. We recommend consulting with local beekeepers, taking courses and reading widely, including this Flow sponsored pamphlet on beekeeping safety.
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If you are a new beekeeper, you might not have realised how wonderfully subversive it was to receive your Flow Hive brood box without foundation inserts. These pre-fab, plastic or beeswax, comb-stamped sheets are a standard in beekeeping equipment. They are usually accepted and used by new beekeepers without question. Some mistakenly believe that they are a necessity for comb building despite the fact that honey bees have been building their own natural comb without the help of beekeepers for millions of years!
Throwing out your foundation can be met with more controversy than you might expect. You may have already been urged by other beekeepers not to try foundationless frames or been warned that doing so would negatively impact your bees. It’s true that foundationless beekeeping requires more effort on the part of the beekeeper and the bees, but for me, the pros far outweigh the cons. So, what are some of the benefits of natural comb?
When you give bees the choice, they will always choose empty frames where they can build natural comb, over foundation frames. For me, this is the most compelling reason to ditch foundation and let the bees build their own comb. My beekeeping philosophy is to let the bees decide and trust that bees know best whenever possible.
Wax foundation is made from recycled commercial beekeeper’s beeswax. Studies have shown them to be heavily contaminated with agricultural pesticides and miticides. Pesticides bond easily to the oils in beeswax and can build up over time. These chemical contaminants have been shown to disrupt bee development and lifespan as well as an increase incidences of queen failures.
Foundation forces the bees to build abnormally large cells and results in equally larger bees. There is an increasing body of research that suggests this can contribute to health complications for the bees, which might explain why bees naturally build smaller cell sizes and will regress to this smaller size over time. Why fight nature?
You might have heard from experienced beekeepers that you shouldn't practice foundationless beekeeping because it will result in less honey. This claim is made for a couple of reasons, but none of them are relevant to the Flow Hive! So, pay them no mind.
If you plan to go foundationless, it just takes a little effort and care to handle your frames in such a way that they do not break. The main thing is not to tip your frames during inspections. This will put strain on the combs. Instead, hold them straight up and down.
The most important part of foundationless beekeeping is getting the bees to build straight combs. Once you remove the foundations, there’s nothing stopping the bees from building in any direction they please. More often than not, they will build across multiple frames if you give them the chance. The result is that you will have a very hard time pulling up frames without destroying comb and angering your bees. You can avoid this (mostly) by installing comb guides!
If you’ve purchased the complete Flow Hive, your brood box frames came with comb guides! These guides are wooden strips that run the length or your frame and fit nicely in the groove at the top. I recommend you coat them with beeswax and nail them in place for the best results. These guides are more or less permanent and should help keep your bees building straight for years to come. However, if you wish to add an additional brood box or maybe you’ve purchased only the Flow Super, you need to make your own comb guides.
Materials:
Gather your paint sticks, beeswax, paint brush and melting canister around your stove top. Start by melting your beeswax in something you don’t care much about, like a metal can! Warning: beeswax is flammable so do not leave it unattended and use a double boiler if you want to play it safe.
Use your paintbrush to apply the wax along your paint stick. Coat both sides about halfway up. No need to coat the entire thing since only half of it will be exposed. A single coat should be enough. If your wax cools too much, the wax will become tacky and hard to apply. Just turn the heat back on to return it to a paintable state.
Center and nail your paint sticks (beeswax half down) in the groove or slot at the top of your frame. Your paint stick should hang down about an inch. Note: If your paint sticks are shorter than 14″, you may need to use two. The 14″ sticks work just fine when centered because the gap on either end is small enough that bees are not tempted to cross. I use two nails on each end of the comb guide and give a small tug to make sure it is secure.
The best way to handle cross-combs is to avoid them in the first place with proper guides, but even they are not fail-proof. For this reason, I recommend you peek in on your bees once every two weeks while they are drawing out new comb in the brood box. It is much simpler to fix cross-combs if you catch them before it becomes too extensive.
In most cases, the bees will initially build straight and then flare out and connect to the neighboring frame. In this scenario, I recommend removing any empty or straight frames from the brood box to give yourself room to work on the crossed-comb. Separate the portion of the comb that has gone awry from the neighboring frame by cutting the comb away from the top, bottom and side of the frame. Pull this neighboring frame out of the way, and gently push the flared piece of comb into it’s correct frame. Use a rubber band to secure it in place. Once you have corrected the combs, you may want to reorder your frames to prevent more cross-combs. For example, you may move a frame where the comb has not been completely drawn out between two straight frames that have already been drawn. This boxes in the partially empty frame and will prevent the bees from building it crooked again.
In extreme cases, you may find yourself with several frames or even an entire box of comb built perpendicular to the frames. Once again, your first step is to remove any empty of straight combs to give yourself room to work. If this cannot be done, you will need to break comb to pull out the first frame. Select one of the outer frames and smoke the area heavily to drive the bees out of harm’s way. Then pull the frame up the best you can. I am afraid there is no way to avoid destruction. You may want a container with a lid to place leaky, damaged combs. You will likely not be able to save them and are better off harvesting or discarding them. Now, you perform a bit of surgery. Try to make the least number of cuts to extract whatever straight pieces of comb that you can. Separate them entirely from the frames and then use rubber bands to secure them within the frames again, this time, going the proper direction. Once again, you may want to rearrange your frames to prevent further incidents of crossing. The trick is not to place two frames with gaps in the same place next to each other.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her home town of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey provides educational opportunities for hundreds of new beekeepers each year. Her beekeeping exploits and unique business model have inspired people all around the world. She is the author of the beekeeping blog Beekeeping Like A Girl and maintains a popular Instagram account. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her sixty colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
]]>Brood inspections are an incredibly important part of looking after your bees – if not the most important part!
In addition to our post below, we have a livestream of Cedar performing a brood inspection with questions and answers from the audience.
Read on for how to conduct a brood inspection – with information for newbees, or more experienced beekeepers wanting a refresher or different point of view.
In spring/summer, it is a good idea to inspect your hive more often – about every 2-3 weeks. We recommend to check in with your local beekeeping club, as the frequency will depend on the local climate and needs of your bees.
As you come to build more of an awareness of your colony, you will be able to also sense whether everything is going okay, whether the hive is bursting at the seams and in need of more room, whether they seem to be a bit weaker, or numbers are declining etc. They will signal when it comes time to do a hive inspection.
Make sure to only conduct inspections on calm, warm days (i.e. not cold, not windy, and not raining) when the outside temperature is above 15°C (59°F).
The ideal time is in the middle of the day when the majority of forager bees are out, and the outside temperature is warmest.
Get a smoker going and ensure there is enough fuel so it doesn’t go out at a crucial time. There is a bit of an art to this – we like to use scrap newspaper and some lightweight lighting material, such as dried leaves and grass, adding a little at a time, whilst puffing the bellows, until there is quite a flame visible. At this stage add extra material, ensuring to pack it down quite a bit. Keep compressing the bellows of the smoker.
Be careful not to burn yourself.
We like to add slightly damp—or fresh—grass clippings on top to make the smoker a bit cooler.
Once lit, give a few puffs of cool smoke in the hive entrance a couple of minutes before opening to allow it to make its way through the hive, masking the pheromones and calming the bees.
Make sure to wear protective gear, and ensure it is thoroughly zipped up before cracking into your hive with your j-hive tool.
Warning... a full super can be heavy! If you have a full super above your brood box, make sure you have a beekeeping buddy available to give you hand to safely remove it.
Before you go into your hive for a brood inspection, it’s good to have an idea of what you want to be looking for, this will ensure you are working methodically and efficiently.
Food
Eggs
Disease
Space
Swarms.
This is what you should be looking for when you are conducting your brood inspection.
You want to make sure the bees have enough capped honey and pollen supplies for the time of year (and the expected nectar flow) – especially for overwinter.
The number of frames of honey that you should leave depends on your climate. Please consult local beekeepers for guidance on how much they leave for their colonies over the winter. Read more about overwintering here.
Multi-colour pollen stored in naturally drawn comb:
Capped honey stored, and some uncapped nectar in the bottom center of the frame – when held up the sunlight, you will see nectar glistening in the cells:
3 day old larvae and eggs are also a sign of a recently active queen.
A view down a brood cell with eggs. When the frame is held up to the light, freshly laid eggs are easily seen. A healthy queen will lay her eggs in the centre of the cell:
A frame of very healthy looking capped brood pattern:
If an excess of drone brood is present (which the photo below does not depict), this could mean your queen is infertile or not present – worker bees can also lay eggs—which are unfertilised and thus become drone brood—in emergency situations when the queen has died.
Drone bees are generally larger overall than worker bees. They have large eyes and a fat thorax, whereas the worker bees have smaller proportioned eyes and body.
Here you can see white grubs, as well capped worker-brood, and worker and drone bees:
You don’t need to find the queen, however if you do, it’s always a moment of real excitement!
Can you spot the queen? She has a long, pointed abdomen – perfect for laying eggs.
You can also assess the presence of your queen by sight of eggs and approximately 3-day old larvae.
Think your hive may be without a queen? Read more about diagnosing whether your hive is queenless here.
Pest and disease – check for presence. Have a look at our Pest and Disease resource for what these may look like when manifested.
For example, sunk cells or pin-prick in the capped brood can indicate AFB or EFB.
Be aware of any cross-combing as you move through the brood box, especially when using foundationless frames. Read more about foundationless frames and cross comb here.
If end brood frames have brood, it means the colony may require more space, as typically they work from the centre-outwards. Edge frame should have honey in it, as it is part of their thermal-mass stabilisation.
Depending on your local conditions, this may be the time to add either the Flow Super or a second brood box.
Check for whether the hive is overcrowded, if there are drones and also queen cells, this could all indicate your hive might be getting ready to swarm.
Queen cells and cups on a brood frame. They are the large protrusions on the surface of the frame:
The Forager is possibly the most recognisable bee in the colony.
Once she’s a mature adult, around 21 days old, her duties shift to tasks outside the hive, mainly collecting pollen, nectar, water and resin. She works in response to the needs of the colony with incredible communication and navigation skills.
She can visit up to 5 thousand flowers in a single day, yet in her lifetime, will only create 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey!
She can fly at an average speed of 24 km per hour, travel up to 10 kms from her hive in search of forage, and is capable of carrying large loads of nectar and pollen equalling her own body weight! How efficient is that 🙂
The Guard Bee is tasked with protecting the hive – distinguishing between normal activity and dangerous threats. She quickly calls for assistance with her alarm pheromone if needed.
You’ll find the Guard Bee standing at the hive entrance on her back legs with her front legs raised, inspecting bees who enter. Her colony can be recognised by their odour and will be admitted. She’ll also welcome bees approaching with nectar or pollen – happy to accept free food from a bee entering the wrong hive.
On the lookout for intruders such as robbers from another colony, or predators large and small– she’s joined by a posse of 10-20 guards to help her with this important task.
The Architect is responsible for building honeycomb – created from perfect hexagons which, of all possible structures, use the least amount of wax to yield the maximum amount of space and strength. Honeycomb weighing 100g can support up to 4kg of honey!
Around 10 days old, she develops special wax glands under her abdomen, which secrete liquified wax. This hardens into small flakes when exposed to the air. Using her hind legs she passes it to her mandibles and mixes it with saliva to make it malleable for creating comb.
When creating or repairing comb, she’ll link together with other bees, leg to leg, to create a bee scaffold. Her six legs have hooks, which she uses to hold onto another’s – like holding hands – which creates a delicate chain. This is called ‘festooning’.
The Queen is the most important member of a bee colony. She is solely responsible for reproduction and is capable of laying 2,000 eggs per day!
Her unique pheromones reassure the colony that she is alive and well.
The Queen’s pheromonal signal also helps to create a social hierarchy. It promotes working together and stimulates activities such as cleaning, building, guarding, foraging, and brood feeding. It also prevents queen rearing and inhibits worker reproduction.
If there are weak signals (ie: if the queen is old, sick or dies), within 12–24 hours the workers are triggered to rear new queens from young fertilised eggs.
The Drone is a male bee, whose only real role is to mate with a queen. But not the queen from his colony.
Characterised by a large body and eyes twice the size of a worker bee, The Drone is raised for mating in spring and dies off, or is ejected from the hive, in autumn.
He does not forage, construct comb, or perform any other helpful function within the hive, except on occasion when he might fan his wings to help with cooling – mostly, he’s a drain on resources.
In spring, he will leave the hive during the day to hang out at drone congregation areas, in hopes of discovering a virgin queen on her mating flight. If he's lucky enough to mate, he will not survive…
The Queen’s Attendant is part of a special entourage who always accompany her royal highness.
She is vital to the health and survival of the Queen, who is incapable of taking care of her own basic needs. She’s responsible for cleaning, grooming, carrying the Queen’s waste and tending to her every need.
She even helps to predigest the Queen’s food – who doesn't have the correct anatomy to do this for herself. This leaves the Queen plenty of time to spend on the activity that she was created for – laying eggs…
]]>Honey bees need water but may drown while trying to collect it. Keep bees from drowning in your pool or pet's water bowl by providing a safe place for them to drink.
If given a choice, bees will always choose to drink “dirty” water. They appear to favour water that has become murky with algae. So, grant them their wish and set up a bee pond. It doesn’t have to be a big, fancy pond – create a simple water garden with half wine barrels or a similar container.
You just need a barrel, mosquito fish and some floating plants (like water lettuce or water hyacinth). Sometimes these types of ponds do better with a small amount of water circulation, like a small solar fountain. Once a pond is established, it can be very low maintenance.
Clean decaying organic matter from the bottom of the pond so the water is not robbed of its oxygen.
No matter what type of water source you provide, make sure the water current isn’t too strong. Bees like trickling water because there is less of a drowning risk. I often see them hovering or even landing on fountains that have a gentle trickling function. Or fountains that drain into a rock-filled grate.
A simple way to give bees water is just to fill your bird bath with stones. If you already have a bird bath, you can make it attractive to bees by adding these additional landing areas.
You may find that you need two bird baths! One for the bees and one for the birds, because bees can sometimes deter birds from using that same bath.
The downside to bird baths is that they need to be refilled often.
Some beekeepers simply use buckets. Add a sponge in a bucket for a simple landing pad or hang a rag halfway in so the bees can take water directly from the rag, or float corks in the water. Any non-toxic floatation device will work!
Make sure you refill your bucket and check it often for mosquito larvae.
Thanks to Beekeeping Like a Girl, Hillary Kearney for permission to republish her blog. Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her hometown of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
]]>Here are some frequently asked questions about colony management, answered for you!
Sometimes colonies can be aggressive if they are queenless, at other times particular nectar sources can make bees more prone to defensive behaviour, while sometimes they may react strongly if you’re inspecting them in a bit of a bumpy manner (which may not affect other colonies).
If you are finding that your bees are consistently aggressive, and you’ve ascertained that your hive is not queenless, it is not what flowers they are feeding on, and your bees respond in this manner regardless of your beekeeping style, it may be a case of needing to requeen. Requeening can bring in different behavioural traits—check in with the queen breeder about whether your replacement queen is a gentle one.
You need to first of all ascertain why it is that your hive is weak—could it be the time of year? Should your colony be in their expansion phase? (i.e. in spring or summer) If yes, then do a full brood inspection.
This may affect the health of your colony—you must treat any pests or diseases as per the legal requirement of your department of primary industry.
Can’t find her? Look for a good brood pattern and different stages of eggs, larvae, pupae and brood.
No? Maybe your queen is either not present (and something has happened to her 😞), infertile or not laying. Check out our blog for more info.
Without a healthy, robust fertile queen, your hive will be low in numbers and may be struggling. You may need to requeen.
Is there enough forage available? You may need to supplement their feed.
Have you chosen a sheltered position for the hive which is away from prevailing winds (especially the entrance)? In cool climates it should be in a dry sunny position, and in hot climates the hive will benefit from some shade, particularly in Summer. Ideally, face the entrance in a southerly direction if you’re in the northern hemisphere and northerly direction for the southern hemisphere.
It is possible that your bees may have been poisoned by pesticides.
There may be a multitude of other reasons – sometimes a colony's strength can even vary within the same apiary.
If you are unsure, we recommend checking with your local experienced bee mentor or beekeeping club/association.
You can reuse the same brood comb within the same colony for a few years, however after this timeframe, you may consider replacing the brood frames, as the internal diameter of each cell will become progressively smaller over time – even though the nursery bees will clean out each cell, remnants of the cocoon will still be glued to the cell wall.
Residues of pesticides and disease organisms can also remain inside the wax – it is therefore recommended to cut away very dark old comb (or just replace the entire frame) to make a healthy environment for your baby bees. Make sure to do this before spring when the hive is building it’s numbers and expanding.
During a dearth of nectar, it may be important to feed your bees with supplementary food. If there is a drought, make sure to check whether your bees have enough stores, and also make sure they have a clean water source.
Do not feed your bees honey (unless it is their own) due to risk of contamination (or it not being real honey!). Most beekeepers choose to feed a sugar solution. Check in with local experienced beekeepers and beekeeping clubs/associations what they recommend.
The best way to prevent cross-combing is to avoid them in the first place with comb guides, and importantly by performing routine inspections as the comb is being built out. If you see the comb being built out of place you can easily nudge it back on course when the comb is still fresh.
You can also use wax foundation for the bees to build out from.
Read more about cross combing on our FAQ here and read more on foundationless frames here.
Swarming is when the old queen bee leaves the hive with 10-30 000 worker bees in search of a new home. This is a natural evolutionary behaviour for bees – they do this every year in spring.
Some beekeepers consider it poor practice to let your hive swarm; as you effectively lose half the population of your colony—and the swarming bees gorge themselves on honey before leaving in search of a new home—it can leave the colony left behind less strong and robust, taking them more time to rebuild their numbers, which means you mightn’t have the chance to harvest honey in this season (depending on your season).
Swarming can also spread pests and diseases and result in unmanaged feral colonies (if you don’t manage to capture your swarm) – which can further exacerbate pests and diseases.
You can attempt to prevent your hive from swarming by taking precautionary measures.
Queen cup – acorn-like bulge on the surface of the frame. This can be an indicator the colony is getting ready to swarm.
Queen cells. A sure sign your hive is trying to reproduce a new queen. Either your bees are about to swarm, or they already have.
Read more about what to do in preparation for spring here.
Sometimes bees may also swarm outside of spring, so it is important to keep an eye on your colony during your regular brood inspections throughout spring and summer.
Some beekeepers recommend having more than one brood box in colder climates, or for if you want to expand your colony in warmer climates.
Having more than one brood box (generally two is considered the norm) to take you into winter in cold climates can mean your colony is more likely to survive through the depths of winter. It also means they are more likely to thrive in the next season, and be strong and prolific in gathering and storing nectar.
It can also mean the bees can collect enough food for themselves over winter. It is recommend to go into winter with a least a full super of honey, if you are not going to feed your bees. Read more about overwintering here.
To add an extra brood box to your hive make sure your first brood is almost overflowing with bees – you want at least 90% of the brood frames to be completely built out. Then add the next brood box on top, as you would the Flow Super, keeping the queen excluder above the new brood box when you go to add your Flow Super.
It’s also possible to add a second brood box once the Flow Super is already in place, however, you may see less activity in your super while the bees build out the brood frames below. The bees may even move honey stored in the Flow Frames down to the brood boxes temporarily, however, once the second brood box has been built out in full, the bees should resume activity in the Flow Frames and Super.
As always, we strongly recommend checking in with local experienced beekeepers for recommendations. But remember—ask two beekeepers and get three different answers!
Have more colony management questions you’d like answers to? Email, chat or call us today!
]]>Since honey bees will fly up to three miles to forage, urban beekeepers find themselves at the mercy of their neighbours when it comes to pesticide usage. Unlike agricultural settings, most urban and suburban homeowners are free to use pesticides without restrictions, licensing or instruction. Improper use of pesticides can devastate nearby beehives. Improper use includes using too much, applying it to plants when they are in bloom, or applying it at the wrong time of day. It’s important to understand that the majority of these incidents happen as a result of ignorance, not malice. Many simply fail to read instructions before using the product they buy and do so without an understanding of the consequences of their actions.
The rooftop apiary of a student of mine was recently poisoned and exhibited all of those symptoms. Her two new colonies were thriving and just beginning to fill their second brood box with comb when disaster struck. Nearly all of the foragers were poisoned. Many of them never made it back to the hives, but several hundred did and unfortunately, they passed on the poison to the house bees. When this happens, you will find dead bees inside the hive and young bees will drop off the frames when you lift them out. At this stage of poisoning, a colony’s chance of survival is minimal. However, luckily, in this case after three weeks her queens are still alive and laying well so we are hopeful that they will recover.
Sadly, most poisoned hives never recover, but in most cases it is a simple numbers game. The bigger your colony is, the better its chance of survival. Once pesticides knock out the field bees, the population will be drastically reduced. A hive with a low population is now at risk for a number of other problems because it will not have the necessary workforce needed to complete daily tasks.
One big one is cleanliness. A poisoned hive can easily become overwhelmed with the housework or cleaning out dead bees and any poisoned larvae. You can’t do much to help this, but if you notice dead bees on the bottom board, be sure to clear them out of the hive to prevent any secondary bacterial infections from taking hold.
Another big problem is food stores. Without foragers, your bees will be forced to live on what they have. If their stores are low, they can end up dying of starvation! Make sure your bees have enough pollen and honey stores and if they do not you should feed them until they can build up their population again.
It is very common for a poisoned colony to end up queenless and it does not always happen right away. You should take special care not to overlook the symptoms of a colony that has lost its queen. If you notice your bees are making new queens, you should let them or replace her yourself. It is likely that your queen has been damaged or killed by the pesticide exposure.
As a rule of thumb, I recommend you reduce the entrance whenever a colony is weakened to protect them from predators. Be sure to do this when your colony is recovering from a poisoning as well as they will be extremely vulnerable.
Lastly, a colony whose population drops suddenly can also fall victim to mites, moths and beetles. Keep a close eye out for these villains in the weeks following the poisoning and take appropriate action against them if you see any signs. It’s a good idea to head off moths and beetles by removing any abandoned comb. A weakened colony may not have the resources to defend all of the combs they once occupied.
We cannot control where our bees go to forage, but what we can do is educate our communities about protecting our pollinators with responsible pest management practices. Some strategies for reaching your neighbors include: door-to-door canvassing with educational pamphlets, posting on online community forums, contacting local leaders or news organisations, volunteering to speak to garden groups. Here is some useful information to share when employing these outreach strategies.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her home town of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
]]>European honey bees pollinate a third of our food crops, making a huge contribution to our food supply chain, our economy and the broader ecosystem, so the more we can help them do their thing, the better off everyone is. European honey bees will feast on a range of flowering plants, but they do have preferences.
Like humans, bees love herbs. And they’re great to plant as they’re handy in the kitchen and around the house too. And there are many beautiful flowering shrubs and trees you can plant which will have nearby bees waggle-dancing with joy.
Bees are also attracted to many food plants. The great thing about planting some citrus, strawberries or a passionfruit vine is the symbiotic benefit. The bees get their pollen and nectar, and the plants produce bigger, healthier, better formed fruit in greater abundance.
Bees looooove thyme. It’s a one-stop shop for foragers, providing high yields of both pollen and nectar.
Give it good drainage, and it will prosper in most climates. You can even use it on paths and as a lawn plant. It’s also a delicious culinary herb. Popular throughout the Mediterranean because it makes for super-yummy honey, neighbouring beekeepers will love you if you plant this.
Bees love blue and violet flowers best, especially the many species of lavender you can grow at home. Like thyme, it produces an abundance of both pollen and nectar.
A beautiful plant to grow, you can use sprigs to scent your home and nothing’s nicer than being downwind from a lavender bush on a sweet, breezy summer day.
Sage costs a fortune at the shops, so planting plenty of it in your yard or on your balcony is fantastic for the home cook. It also happens to produce flowers that are among the honey bee’s very favourites.
They go crazy for it! When they find some they will do a dance so the rest of the colony knows where the party is.
We have more than 1,500 species of native bees in Australia – ranging from larger bumblebees to smaller native bees.
Some live in colonies, while many work and live a solitary life. There are both ground and twig nesting varieties. Not surprisingly, many native bees prefer native plants!
Most of the native bees in Australia are solitary and they come in all shapes and sizes. Essentially, a pollinator house is a structure which accommodates solitary nesting native bees by providing cavities in natural materials for them to live in. You can make your own, from a very basic design (drilling some holes into a block of wood) to as complex and creative as you like.
Use this free fact sheet to help you start off your very own bee friendly garden.
Need some special tools to create your next masterpiece?
Check out our Flow Gardening Tool kit
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The comb in brood frames gradually becomes darker over time as the wax hardens and the brood cells are reused multiple times. The brood cells shrink in size and can be blocked with propolis. Replace the old frames with new empty ones and the bees will build fresh comb. When doing a brood inspection, look out for dark, hard comb - these are the frames you want to replace.
If there is no brood in the frame you want to swap out, you can immediately remove it from the hive. Check for the queen and shake any bees off the frame and back into the hive. If you’re using foundationless frames, you can simply cut the old comb out with a knife or hive tool and replace the empty frame. If you’re using foundation, you’ll need to have new frames ready to replace the ones you remove.
If the frame you want to replace contains brood or eggs, you’ll need to wait until they’ve hatched before removing it. Take the frame out of the brood box, shake the nurse bees back in and put the new frame into the super. You can temporarily remove one of the Flow Frames to make room for it. Put a new frame into the brood box and make sure to put the queen excluder on top of the brood box. Another option is to move the old frame from the center to the edge of the brood box. Bees usually store honey in the edge frames.
You can remove the frame once the brood has hatched. This can take up to 3 weeks if there are eggs in the frame. Capped brood will hatch within 1-2 weeks.
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Some new beekeepers may be confused about when and why to requeen a hive. Commercial beekeepers with large operations often requeen their hives on a schedule. This practice is based on the theory that older queens will not lay as well as a young queen. Some requeen every year and others requeen every two years, but if you are a hobbyist, I don’t see any reason to requeen on a schedule. I often tell my students, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” Beekeepers with large operations have hundreds or sometimes thousands of beehives. Unlike hobbyists, they simply do not have time to individually evaluate them all and decide if they need to be requeened. So, if your hive is thriving with a three-year-old queen, there really is no reason to replace her.
Reasons for replacing the queen include: colony health, under-performance, temperament or apiary expansion. You can read more about identifying whether your colony needs requeening here.
In the image below shows a commercially purchased queen bee marked to make identification easier.
Step 1: Before installing your new queen, you need to remove the old one. In most cases “remove” actually means kill. This is nobody’s favorite beekeeping task, but it is sometimes necessary. To kill the queen quickly grab her off the comb by the wings and then pinch her head between your fingers. Some beekeepers like to do this several days before installing the new queen and others do it on the same trip.
Step 2: Install the new queen. Your new queen will come inside a cage to protect her from the worker bees while they adjust to her smell. The queen breeder often gives specific instructions on how to install the queen. Since the breeder knows their bees best, I would suggest following their instructions. However, I generally position the queen cage on its side and affix it to comb with open brood with a rubber band.
The image below is an example of a queen arriving in a cage. Remove the cap before placing in the brood box and the queen will eat her through the candy blocking the exit.
Step 3: Follow up on your work. You do not want to disturb a colony too soon after installing a new queen or they may decide to reject her. I like to check one week after install to see if she has been released from her cage. Sometimes a queen can get stuck in the cage, after one week if this is the case, go ahead and release her. If she is out of the cage, try to find her, but you should also look for eggs. Once the new queen is laying you can consider your requeening a success. However, you need to be sure to check for supersedure cells. Worker bees will often try to overthrow their new queen and make a queen of their own genetics to replace her. If you do not find and destroy all the queen cells, the worker bees will kill the queen you installed once they have raised their own. For this reason, it is also important that you do not wait too long after installing the queen to check the hive. If you wait longer than it takes to raise a new queen, it will be too late.
Hilary Kearney is a full-time beekeeper in her home town of San Diego, California. Her business Girl Next Door Honey educates hundreds of new beekeepers each year. She is the author of the Beekeeping Like A Girl blog and maintains popular Instagram, Facebookand Twitter accounts. When she’s not rescuing bees, teaching about bees, photographing bees or managing one of her 60 colonies, she’s sleeping and dreaming of bees.
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Beekeepers tend to be passionate, opinionated folk, and, like joining any sort of community, it can take time to really get to know how to get the best out of your club experience.
Clubs are often run on a volunteer basis. Most people also have busy lives in addition to their roles within the club, so be aware that they’re giving their time generously! This can sometimes result in things moving a bit slowly within the club. If you are in a hurry to get started you might reach out to a local beekeeping mentor or beekeeping course to fast track your learning.
If you have a bit of time, then there’s no better way to get completely immersed in a club than to start volunteering yourself – just like a beehive (or the bumblebees in the photo below), many hands make light work.
Every club will have a different way of sharing beekeeping knowledge.
Long term beekeepers often have a lot of valuable information to share, but some can take time to warm up :)... Some may not communicate in a way that you’re familiar with – they may share their knowledge sparingly, sometimes only after building trust with you. This may mean working physically alongside them and helping out at the beeclub hives.
Other beekeepers are more than happy to share their knowledge and may even offer to come and help out with your hives in a one-on-one bee-mentorship.
Most beekeepers have lots of incredible knowledge to share – be on the lookout for those whose teaching style suits you and your learning style best. And be willing to adjust your approach to suit.
Having a million and one questions when you’re first learning about bees is 100% normal and definitely encouraged.
Though, you may need to gauge how receptive members are to questions.
For some members, the beekeeping club has been a place to be social, where they’ve developed relationships over many years and where they feel connected with people who understand them. Sometimes the presence of newbees may dilute the sense of connection the long term members had valued. Keep in mind that your eagerness may be quite overwhelming for them.
This doesn’t mean you need to mute your enthusiasm! Try searching out for those who are forthcoming with their support, and maybe treading lightly and kindly around those who are not.
Don’t let anyone squash your excitement about bees. These fascinating creatures are literally the bee's knees, and your enthusiasm can be the kindling to reignite others’ passions.
Established clubs often have long-standing club politics – our best recommendation is to avoid being involved if possible.
You’re there to learn about bees :) Feel free to join in on club discussions, volunteer your time, or participate in extracurricular activities; this is where the best learning is to be had.
It’s pretty understandable that after doing things a certain way for a long time, people are probably going to form strong opinions that are hard to change.
When Flow Hives burst onto the scene in 2015, there were many long-term beekeepers who were sceptical that they would work and somewhat threatened by this ‘new way’ of harvesting. It is still common to find some long term beekeepers who are confronted by the new technology.
This is something to bear in mind when suggesting new ideas – if they are initially dismissed, it’s fine to question why they think your ideas won’t work.
Remember that at the end of the day you are there to begin your exciting journey of learning about bees, and the methods of keeping bees (whether in a Flow Hive or not). All that differs is the way in which you harvest honey. Everyone has their preferences – we can only marvel at the huge variety of ways that people choose to keep bees!
Of course, it can be frustrating when opinions are not based on a strong understanding of the incredible and successful beekeepers in the Flow community.
Some difficult comments you may come across:
We hope you really enjoy your beekeeping club experience (we love working with our partner clubs!) But remember, if you find individual attitudes particularly challenging, it’s okay to leave, or look for another group – you might also like to consider starting your own community. We also have a Flow Forum and FB group which can be a handy place to find supportive mentors.
Not a total newbee? Let us know whether you have any tips to add for newly-emerged bee-fans!
]]>Did you know that different species of bees have different nesting behaviours?
Some bees live cooperatively in colonies similar to those of the European honey bee, while many work and live a solitary life.
There are 4,000 or so species of native bees in the US– 90 percent of which are solitary-nesters. These (often overlooked) garden allies, require and seek out a cosy home to nest in.
Different types of pollinators require different types of homes. They can nest in all types of habitat, from reeds to hollow logs and underground burrows.
Twig & cavity-nesting bees use hollow plant stems or holes in wood for laying their eggs. These solitary bees do not have queens or workers, nor do they store any honey in their tiny nests. These bees are also non-aggressive and do not swarm.
In addition to nesting, some species like to hibernate over winter and are on the lookout for sheltered spaces with plant matter as insulation.
A pollinator house (or hotel) is a structure which accommodates solitary-nesting native bees by providing cavities in natural materials for them to live in.
Twig-nesting bees will use cavities in dried timber–or craft burrows themselves, if the timber is soft enough–for their pupae cocoons.
Our Flow Pollinator House aims to replicate these ideal nesting conditions for the dual purpose of supporting these incredible insects whilst your garden reaps the rewards of their residence.
With bee numbers in decline due to habitat destruction (among other things), having a pollinator house in your garden can help solitary-nesters by providing for them a cosy home to live in and raise their young.
If you would like to create your own pollinator house – this can be a really satisfying project which may have a great impact for locally residing pollinators.
Alternatively, by purchasing Flow Pollinator House you not only gain the benefits from creating an appealing home for solitary-nesting bees to take up residence in your garden, but you also participate in working on the bigger picture issue of protecting and conserving habitat corridors for bees worldwide. Flow is proud to be donating 100% of profits from the sale of these houses to organisations hard at work protecting wild habitats all around the world– now that’s sweet!
Pollinators need large areas of habit to flourish– the more we can do to protect and conserve native habitats, the more space these tiny environmental champions will have to do their important work.
For the ground-nesting solitary bees, leaving some areas in your garden a little messy can allow them to successfully raise their young, and keep a safe home.
By providing habitat for pollinators to dwell, as well as planting a plethora of native flowering vegetation, providing a clean water and mud source, and limiting pesticide (including insecticides and herbicides) use, you can do a great deal to help out with the plight of pollinators.
]]>Once you have split your hive, you have the option to:
As with most beekeeping practices, this comes down to personal preference – we recommend doing some background research to decide which option best suits your situation.
If you want to get good genetics from a queen breeder, if your colony is very aggressive (and are not Africanized bees), or if your hive split has not yet successfully raise a new queen. Read more about this here.
Disclaimer. There is no “right way” to install a new queen to a hive split – as with all beekeeping, there are many methods.
1. Take 4-5 frames full of brood with healthy brood pattern from a healthy, prolific hive, and install into a new brood box – 4 brood frames if your hive is an 8 frame Langstroth hive (which is also our Flow Hive Classic 6 frame, Flow Hive 2, or Flow Hive Hybrid 3 frame), and 5 brood frames if your hive is a 10 frame Langstroth hive (which is our Flow Hive Classic 7 frame).
2. Make sure to keep the 4 frames pushed tightly into the middle of the brood box, with the new, undrawn-comb frames on either side; this helps keep the brood space intact, maintains a stable temperature, and also encourages the bees to continue drawing straight comb.
3. Make sure the original queen is in ONE hive. Whether this is the split, or the original hive from which you took the split, this doesn’t matter – just make sure it is not the hive you plan on introducing the new queen into. The worker bees will kill the new queen if the old queen is present 😞
Keep a look out for the old queen – just in case. Check the lid – sometimes she likes to hide here.
What is a queen in a cage?
Queen in a cage is a queen bee (either mated or not – you will need to check with your Queen Breeder regarding this) with a couple of escort bees (they are worker bees, also known as attendants). The escort bees feed the queen and chew the candy from the inside of the cage.
Once installed (and the cap on the candy has been removed), the worker bees will chew the candy from the other side; this means the hive can first get used to the pheromones of the new queen before she is let free.
Some beekeepers place the cage on the floor of the hive—if you do this, be careful to ensure that there is no cold weather forecasted, as she can die without the colony to keep her warm.
OR
You can install the queen cage between the top bars of the brood frames – CAREFUL of placement (e.g. if placed into a section of the frame with honey, the queen may drown) and orientation of the cage.
Orientation of the cage: If a worker dies & the cage is placed vertically, this could cause a problem. The cage should be placed horizontally.
Place the cage between the top bars of brood frames.
It’s a waiting game to see whether the hive accept the new queen. Let the new queen settle in, and the hive become adjusted to her. If the queen is still stuck in the cage, after one week, you can go ahead and release her.
Check for brood laying pattern to see if you’ve been successful in introducing the new queen.
The head-of-pin sized egg should be in the centre of the brood cell.
As Hilary says – “you also need to check for supersedure cells. Worker bees will often try to overthrow their new queen and make a queen of their own genetics to replace her. If you do not find and destroy all the queen cells, the worker bees will kill the queen you installed once they have raised their own. For this reason, it is also important that you do not wait too long after installing the queen to check the hive. If you wait longer than it takes to raise a new queen, it will be too late.”
At Flow, we love to hear from all kinds of beekeepers using all types of methods, but their views are their own and are not necessarily endorsed by Flow. We advise reading widely, connecting with your local beekeeping association and finding a mentor as you delve into this fascinating hobby.
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