Steve has always kept bees, in fact at one stage he had a dozen hives that were kept out on the school agricultural property... In 2010 when we were away on our trip, we lost all of our hives, when Queensland had a deluge of rain that caused major flooding in our area and flooded all our hives....
For a few years after that we didn't have hives at all as the work load extracting the honey was quite time consuming and we were time poor with our jobs. Then one year, we noticed a heap of bees in our back yard and Steve had a sneaking suspicion that a swarm of bees had found the empty hive in our back yard and voila.... we have a hive again....
In 2016 our son introduced Steve to a video about a new sort of bee hive, called a flow hive which did away with robbing the hive and having to set up to extract all the honey. Pete had found it on the Indigogo site and showed his dad....
Steve was very impressed and before it was even on the market, paid a deposit for one for the future....
The flow system is a whole new way of extracting home from European honeybee hives. The bees fill the honey cells and cap them off. When you insert the Flow Key and split the honey cells, gravity does the rest of the work, and the honey simply flows into the trough , through the tube and into your jar or bucket.
It has allowed Steve to keep bees again, as it is very easy now to extract the honey, without the huge set up of the extracting gear and all that comes with it....
Steve's hives are pretty healthy with lots of bees and their honey production is really good. Previously it was such a huge job to rob the hives and extract the honey that he only ever did it once a year. Now we are able to get honey every six to eight weeks...
 |
| The bees tend to sit on the outside of the hive on a hot day.... |
Steve has devised his own set up to be able to extract more than one frame at a time, and fill the bucket...
 |
| A look inside the flow hive at the split frames... |
 |
| The honey is flowing.... |
 |
| Filling the bucket with pure golden honey.... |
 |
| The bucket is full.... |
 |
| Steve's invention of gathering honey from more than one frame... |
With the flow hive well set up, Steve thought he would invest in a new bee suit... The other one is very hot in summer, and this new one allows the breeze to pass through whilst you are working with the bees, and the helmet now is part of the suit itself rather than separate....
 |
| Steve in his new bee suit.... |
 |
| Headgear is attached to the suit and the suit is fully breathable.... |
This suit is a lot heavier than his previous one, but the bonus will be the coolness.. We all know that most of the robbing of hives happens in the summer months... He is one happy chappy and I am sure that bees will be in our lives for quite a few years to come....
0 comments:
Post a Comment