When can I get honey from my Flow hive?

I always wanted to be a beekeeper and now with my complete Flow Hive I can save the bees (they need us!!!) and not disturb them when I’m taking their honey and not getting stung!!! My bees will come in a little wooden box with a screen!! And I already got the jars! I live in northern Idaho and my hive comes in December!! When can I get honey??? Do you know?! –Sadie

The Flow hive certainly drives people to excess—both in dollars $$$ and exclamations!!! You might want to save some of each for later. Sure, I have some thoughts on getting started that may help, as long as you understand I have never touched a Flow hive.

What is a Flow hive?

First, a Flow hive is like any other Langstroth hive except it has a special kind of honey super that holds the Flow frames. A honey super is a place where bees store honey. The box below it, called a brood box, is where the queen bee makes her nest and lays her eggs. It is the place where the adult bees care for the young. It also contains honey and pollen.

If the bees store extra honey in a hive—more than they need for winter—the beekeeper can harvest the surplus. You say in your e-mail you want to help save the bees. If so, you must be careful not to take too much honey from them.

When can you take the honey?

When you first start your new colony, you should leave the honey super, Flow frames, and mason jars in storage; you won’t need them anytime soon.

I don’t mean to sound discouraging, but a package of bees started on brand new woodenware in Idaho is not likely to yield surplus honey the first year. Now listen up: I didn’t say impossible, just unlikely. You may not be able to crank your Flow until the summer of 2017.

I’m not making this up. The harvest you saw in the video came from an established thriving hive. The Flow frames that were tested in both the US and Canada were placed on established thriving hives. According to Kim Flottum in his book The Backyard Beekeeper (p. 94), “Your first-year colony probably won’t have a harvestable amount of honey before late summer, if then.” Dewey Caron in Honey Bee Biology and Beekeeping (p. 166) writes, “Package bee colonies seldom produce a honey surplus the first season.”

How can that be? First of all, packages of bees are usually shipped to the northern areas in April, so they’ve already missed part of the nectar season. Your bees in a box will include a mated queen and perhaps 10,000 other bees. When you put these bees into your new hive, they won’t feel at home right away. There is no furniture nor any pictures on the wall. No cradles in the nursery nor shelves in the pantry. It’s just another wooden box, only bigger than the one they just left.

First they build a home

At first, the worker bees will start to build combs so the queen has a place to lay her eggs. They work fast, and if they have plenty to eat, the bees may have some small combs by the next day. As soon as space is available, the queen will begin to lay.

A queen can lay 2000 eggs per day, but not until she has a place to put them. She may have room for only 50 or 100 eggs on the first couple of days, more as time goes on. Assuming all goes well, these eggs will hatch into adult bees three weeks later. In the meantime, your colony is getting smaller because some of the original bees will die while doing their chores or collecting nectar. Remember, your average worker bee lives a mere four to six weeks during spring and summer.

I know this is hard to picture, but it takes a while for a package of bees to get started. Besides building the nursery area, they also have to build the storage combs and tend to the young. All this takes tremendous amounts of food, food which they have to collect.

Remember your bees arrived late in the spring, took a week or so to settle, and then waited three weeks for the first batch of new bees to hatch. Now it’s mid-May or later and your colony may still be decreasing in total numbers of bees even though the nectar flow is in full swing.

Also, even if your bees fill the entire brood box with brood, honey, and pollen, you may want to add a second brood box so your bees have enough room for winter stores. This decision is partly based on local conditions. I highly recommend you talk to beekeepers in your area to learn what works best. In Idaho, I suspect that most beekeepers use a double deep for overwintering. Ask around.

Nectar flows

Being new to this, you probably don’t know when nectar is readily available in your area. Most areas in North America have a lot of nectar in spring, a period of little or no nectar in the heat of the summer, and then another, although lesser, flow in autumn.

If the population of your hive isn’t large by the end of spring, the colony will be lucky to collect what it needs for the following winter, let alone provide any excess. Because of this, many beekeepers feed sugar syrup to their packages to get them going. Some feed packages straight through the first summer. But be warned: If you put the Flow frames on while feeding your bees, syrup—not honey—will fill the mason jars. Remember, bees cannot change syrup into honey.

Speeding up the process

If you are really eager to turn the Flow crank, you could speed up the process by buying a nuc instead of a package. A nuc is a small colony on drawn combs with a laying queen and brood (eggs, larvae, and pupae that are in the process of growing). Nucs (nucleus colonies) are often available locally from other beekeepers and they give you a head start. A nuc is more expensive than a package, but compared to the price of a complete Flow, it is trivial. You simply take the frames from the nuc and put them directly into your brood box.

You might also be able to buy an entire overwintered colony. If you join a beekeeping club, you can ask around and see if someone is willing to sell a complete hive.

Starting with a nuc or complete colony will give you a much better chance of getting honey your first year. Moving to a southern state or Hawaii may help as well. Still, with bees, there are no guarantees. Your local climate and weather, the health of your bees, swarms, diseases, and your own management decisions will all affect the outcome.

Business as usual

I’m going to stop here because this is a lot for a newbee to absorb. The point, though, is that starting a new colony in a Flow hive is no different than starting a new colony in any other hive. Sometimes we get lucky and can super a new hive and get honey the first year. Most times it doesn’t work that way, and if we harvest more than we should, our bees suffer.

Since you are eager to begin, why not start a colony this year? Buy a nuc, if you can, and a standard Langstroth hive. No you can’t use your Flow frames this year because you don’t have them yet, but with your current plan, you probably won’t be able to use them next year either.

Beekeeping is not a walk in the park: it is life changing. If you learn how to keep bees before your Flow frames arrive, the benefit to you and your bees will be enormous.

Rusty
HoneyBeeSuite

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Final thoughts on Flow

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