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.