Sunday, August 2, 2020

Some Assembly Required

I've been planning to add a FlowHive super to my hive for a while, and purchased it at the same time as the Langstroth. However, it came in 3 boxes, completely in parts. I wasn't ready to assemble it and then have to find a place to put it all before I set it out. So I left it in its component parts until two days ago when the youngerchild and I put the box together. 

This is essentially a medium super with four Flow frames and four regular frames. There were no instructions. There was a link to their website that had a video of the assembly of a similar but not-quite-the-same box. We assembled the box as best we could. We made sure the Flow frames worked and were set at the proper setting for the bees to get started. Then I looked at the box with the pieces for the last four regular frames and discovered that I needed foundation to make them. At least, I thought I did. Again, no instructions. I ordered foundation sheets from Amazon.

The foundation arrived yesterday just as I was headed to work so today I found a video posted by "Beekeeping for Dummies" and assembled the frames with their foundation. There were small pieces of wood left, I'm not sure what those are for. Regardless, I got the frames together and into the box, like so:

Then I got into my bee suit and brought it out. First I quickly peeked in the upper box on the hive and saw lots of capped honey. This is a great sign. Then I set down the queen excluder which is what prevents the queen from laying eggs in the Flow frames and ensures they will only have honey in them. I placed the Flow super onto the rest, put the cover on, and now we just have to see what the bees manage to do before the weather turns cold. 
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