Taking honey from a Flowhive

I have finally taken honey from the Flow® super I placed on top of one my hives last summer. I looked through the hives nearly a month ago after returning from trekking in Nepal – another story – replaced the top and bottom boards, as these were very old and one was rotten. The frames were nearly all full, but my son’s wedding took over our life – painting and renovated a house for the young couple. So I never got to take honey.

So finally last weekend I took honey from 5 out of the 7 frames. The outer frames appeared not quite entirely capped – also I did not have enough honey pots. In total I got about 2.75 kg per frame, a total of 13.2 kg. It took about an hour – mainly because I could not run all the frames at once – the pots I had were too large to fit five side by side under the flow tubes. In the end I used a large plastic box to collect the honey which I poured into 1 kg pots. The honey ran very rapidly without any wax in it – I did not end up filtering it. A couple of bees ended in the honey which I fished out with a spoon!

The middle three frames running - the container filled twice over.

I tipped the hive back a bit to get the honey to flow out.

I have never uploaded a video - here is a short clip of the honey flowing from three of the Flow frames.

Houseboat trip - again

We loved the last Murray River houseboat trip taken in winter so much we tried it again this year. Also as an incentive, we purchased a voucher reducing the cost to half-price - being an incentive to get people to hire during winter. This time we left Renmark and headed down stream, although the first night was spent just below  Whirlpool Corner, upstream, as the weather was too atrocious and the lock-master would not allow us passage through Lock 5. We took a leisurely trip to Lock 4 and back over  5 five nights - with rain on the last night and day. The weather was every type! High wind and dust, frosty mornings, fog and rain.

Fog!

One evening