hi ladies, generally bees are mor reluctant to expand horizontally and it tends to be easier to get them to expand vertically, the fresher comb on the outside may be an indication of a good year for the bees and the need to expand despite the heavy mite load, certainly need to cycle out all those black old frames to reduce risk of pathogens, mite treatment of course and replace the queen for much calmer genetics, those girls looked really aggressively p'd off, glad you noticed the gap in time, that would have been horrible had a few got inside. no doubt that's your plan to nurse the colony back to healthy low mite count, look forward to seeing how it all goes, god bless.
@@nonsensefarm ahh, i went for the flow hives to reduce the lifting involved and cut out the need for extraction equipment, i have 5 flow hives and am looking into expanding with the Finnish version from paradise honey called a smart hive, it's a poly langstroth with their own design of flow frames, good quality but much cheaper than the Aussie flow hives, so gotta give them a try next year, i have an out apiary here in sth of wales uk.
@@nonsensefarm yes, but only 1 super per hive which i can manage much easier than numerous supers, i can also harvest any of the 7 flow frames individually as soon as they're fully capped if i choose, bonus is the honey can be harvested without blending the frames of honey if you choose to, and with no centrifuge involved there's no oxidisation of the honey which reduces the floral taste and aroma of the honey, the way i describe it and a good selling point is, all the benefits of cut comb honey, but without the mouthful of wax. a lot of flow hive users i have seen prefer to just blend it all, harvesting the frames from a hive into one bucket, i prefer to do the frames individually, i quite often find there are subtle differences from frame to frame, unless there's a really big flow on and it all comes in really fast from the same source.
I know it’s odd. That first frame we pulled out in particular had nothing on it and I can’t account for that. Like I said in the video, we had briefly opened the hive in late summer and the bees were bananas and we closed them right up. Other than that, the hive truly hadn’t been opened in years.
Thank you! I’m a big believer in smoke and we used it liberally. The video was edited for time so it wouldn’t be 40 minutes long. I really appreciate you!
So thankful they didn't find their way in your suit, praise God! They were cranky indeed, hopefully the mite treatment will return them to a more healthy state. Great video!!
