Flow hive for starters
When we were first contacted by David end of April 2021 and asked to supply a NUC to a new Flow Hive customers, also being new to bees, I had a bad feeling about supplying the bees going right into winter time.
(Quickwings recommend wearing your bee suit for all types of hive manipulations at all times)
David never had bees before, and I had suggested to hold of until spring, but I think David would not want to wait as the bee-fever took him and pushed him ahead as he had spent the last few weeks assembling the hive and flow frames and was eager to push on.
Now, generally people who start out with beekeeping, are often better off when buying bees going into spring or even wait until spring had sprung already for a good portion as the reason for that is, that when beginner mistakes are made its more forgiving and a bad situation can recover itself during spring, not so in winter.
We went out to David's place and discussed the different options on where to place the hive and went through all his required gear and made sure he was equipped with what he needed.
Then came the big day of the delivery and we had installed the 4+1 Frame NUC into his brood box. Winter was just about to get colder, and we had advised David to do a complimentary feeding strategy of 1:1 sugar water to beef up the hives honey store as it was already fairly late in the season.
During the following spring the NUC nicely developed the bottom brood box into 8 full depth frames slowly running out of space and we decided to place the brand new shiny flow hive super on top.
I personally was new to Flow Hives as within QuickWings we do not operate the Flow Supers as such, and this became a reverse learning experience rather for me too than just for David.
As the bottom box was starting to explode, and we added the flow super, we noticed that bees where not attempting to fill the above supers, and started wontering why. In order to troubleshoot we had added 2x standard Full Dept frames smack bang in the middle of the flow super to see if we could draw the bees into the super.
To our surprise they did, and however only concentrated on the traditional frames.
I then had asked David to coat the flow frames with melted bees wax to see if that where to make any difference and to our surprise that was all that was needed and a few weeks later his flow frames started to fill up nicely.
With his flow super being filled at rapid rate, he started harvesting some nice backyard honey and this seems to now bee the recurring theme of him checking his hive and regularly need to drain the "tank" to make room for some more beautiful backyard honey!
And what started with one of our 4+1 frame Nucleus colonies, developed into quite a thriving backyard producing bee hive. Its quite a big mob being seen on those next set of pictures and David has all the confidence of not being stung while harvesting quite relaxed at the back of it. Even said we would probably recommend suiting up for any hive work regardless, David seems to do just fine as he is, what a credit to our gentle bee genetics that is!
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David is about to be featured in a Customer Testimonial / Youtube interview, so stay tuned to hear about his story and his bee hive.
Please let us know if this information had been useful on your journey to your first set of bee hives!
Feel free to browse to our complimentary Youtube channel which goes hand in hand with this blog.
Happy beekeeping,
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