A Brutally Honest Review of the Flow Hive | Who Should NOT Buy a Flow Hive

hey there i'm larissa a beekeeper of 10 years i worked for commercial a fairies for the last seven and now have my own bee farm here on the big island of hawaii and in this video i'm going to talk about my last two years using the flow hive what i love about it what i didn't like about it the times that i found it incredibly helpful and the reasons why i wouldn't buy another one again so to start out for those of you that aren't too familiar with the flow hive the flow hype is a langstroth style beehive which is a beehive with movable frames the difference between a langstroth style hive and the typical beehive that most beekeepers have is the honey super whereas uh frames normally look like this they're made out of wood or plastic and they may or may not have a foundation sheet inside that the bees build their honeycomb off of the flowbee hive made their own style frame it's taller if it's a deep sized box it's thicker so a 10 frame box only holds seven of these frames and instead of having foundation which is a thin plastic sheet or beeswax sheet that has just the start of the hexagon cells for the bees to build comb off of the flow frames pretty much have the honeycomb already built out of plastic and then it comes with a key so when you put the key in and slid it the cells shift and honey flows out the tube therefore you don't need to do the crush and strain method or use an extractor to harvest your honey now difference and the way that the flow hive makes beekeeping easier is in the honey harvesting but i want to clarify and make sure that you are aware that that is the only way that the flow hive makes beekeeping easier you still have to inspect your hive you still have to check on it you still have to make sure the queen is okay um you still have to take this flow super off and look down below into the bird section which is where the baby bees are it does not take away like any of the duties of a beekeeper you still are doing everything the exact same way you would if you had a top bar hive or a regular langstroth style hive or a multitude of other style beehives that are out there so the first box which we call the brood box the first box of the beehive is the exact same box you can buy it from the flow company or you can buy it from any beekeeping supply site or you can make it yourself the flow hive is really mostly just this honey super which isn't just the frames but it has cutouts in the back so that you can harvest from these frames so then i've used the flow hive these last two years someone gave it to me i have beehives on his property he bought the hive with no intention of actually putting bees in it with the intention of giving it to a beekeeper and asking them to put bees in it and take care of it for him and give him some honey in exchange so first of all i want to be as specific and literal as possible and use the least amount of my opinion at least to start and then i'll add in exactly what what my opinion of the full hive is so the big thing is the cost if you were to go to dateant.com which is a very common beekeeping supply site and you were to buy a beehive and that would be two brood boxes two honey supers the lid the bottom board and all the frames that go inside it assembled and painted it would be 332.55 and this does qualify for free shipping it's one of those like one click kind of purchases they have it all set up and ready for you to purchase and that's the configuration that they recommended two of the deep boxes for the baby bees two of the honey supers for the honey and the lid in the bottom now you add on to that that you're going to potentially want an extractor i don't recommend buying an extractor your first year you might not even need it your second year you can do the crush and strain method very easily and cheaply buying you know 20 worth of stuff at uh target or your be support your beekeeping association might offer an extractor for their members to use for free if you have membership so you might not need it especially if you only have one hive or two hives not really necessary your first year but say you're looking long term for your investment a two frame extractor from dayton is four hundred and one dollars so you're looking at a 733 dollar purchase for one hive um two hives would be a thousand sixty five and three hives would be thirteen ninety seven and that's because you only buy that extractor once and then every additional beehive is 332.55 if you were to buy a flow hive you don't need an extractor so if you were to buy one flow hive the same size as a 10 frame limestrath box which is one brood box one honey super the lid in the bottom board it's going to cost eight hundred dollars plus shipping so if you were to say get two bee hives which is what most people recommend it's going to be hundred dollars for two flow hives no extractor needed and it's a thousand sixty five dollars for two typical langstro style beehives plus an extractor and that does include shipping whereas the flow high shipping is extra so you're seeing how with every bee hive you buy the flow hive is making beekeeping costs more and more and more and more and more um if you're only getting one or two beehives the flow hive isn't that much more of an investment to start um but if you plan on having more than two beehives which is what every beekeeper recommends especially if you're in a cold weather state where you really want to go into winter with at least three bee hives a flow hive is going to be considerably more expensive now the other thing you want to consider is the parts one frame if you buy just a regular lancaster style beehive one of these wooden frames is three dollars and twenty cents and if you break it you can buy a frame saver that goes on the ear to fix it a pack of like 10 or so is like seven dollars and that will extend the life of your friend if you are so inclined um a a flow frame now this is only for your honey super the brood box you can buy one of these 3.20 frames but if you're a flow super if you break one of these frames which i have already um you can only buy them in three packs and it is oh sorry it's a five pack and it's 260 dollars so each frame costs about 51 plus shipping now this is an australian company but they have warehouses they have a warehouse in the united states so shipping is an oc price but if you're looking to be like more self-sufficient or maybe you eat a lot of honey and you want a honey supply the flow high would definitely be more expensive than just buying honey by far because you're dependent on this company to buy these fairly expensive pieces of equipment whereas with the langstroth style hive you can validate yourself out of wood entirely actually or buy some parts and build some parts and then when it comes to fixing things it's a lot easier to fix wood and you can't fix these plastic frames once they break they break and that's that okay and real quick uh i was recently at their website this video is filmed on march 4th 2021 i was just at their website and these prices are considerably less than what they used to be um but they have uh three frame hives uh for 449 uh now a three frame hive is really small i wouldn't recommend a three frame high for somebody in a cold weather state because i don't know that they're going to be able to bring in enough honey um for them to survive the winter it seems really really small and really tight the other thing is that if three frame height is going to be tricky in the summertime because it's going to be a lot more work to prevent swarming even if you do buy a flow hive i still recommend going to a beekeeping supply site and buying a second deep box and a honey super uh on top of your flow hive because you really don't want to put these frames um these flow frames into your beehive over the winter if the honey crystallizes inside that frame is no good and if the queen starts laying in there that comb is no good so you really want to save this super for the honey you're going to be harvesting and have another soup on for the bees to put their winter food in and the second brood box is the brew is good just to help you prevent swarming you can keep bees in just one brew box some people do it but i would describe that as advanced beekeeping so your first few years while you're figuring things out have two bird boxes for the bees now in case this is starting to go over your head you have three different height boxes and we have a youtube video about these three different hype boxes if you want to learn more but in short you have a deep a medium and a shallow the deep box is usually what you start with this is where you put your bees when you first buy them that package or that nuke you put your bees in here once they fill this up you add another d box on top you fill that up with baby bees once these first two boxes are filled with baby bees you will add either a medium or a shallow and these are this is where the bees put their honey now these be these hives um it's called a shallow because it is considerably more shallow than a deep box and that's because this when full is 35 pounds a medium box which is about an inch taller is about 45 pounds when full this deep box the reason why people don't use just all deep boxes is because this is heavy if you were to use just a regular deep box with 10 deep wooden frames in here just like your brood boxes you would be looking at a beehive that weighed over 75 pounds um and so that's why people don't do it now where the flow hive only sells one deep box and one honey box so i find that it's just a lot harder to prevent the bees from swarming and when you use the flow height you need to use a queen excluder it's an option with a typical langstroth style hive but with the flow hive you have to prevent your queen from going into your flow frames she goes in here you've pretty much killed your flow frame and that's a 50 frame you just broke not a 3.20 frame that just has broon in it which is not as big of a deal or not a big deal at all so you have to use a queen excluder with a flow hive and having one box plus a queen excluder that's limiting the queen to that one little box can really allow your bees to swarm pretty quickly especially in areas where maybe there's tons of food and your bees are doing well which is in my case where we are here in hawaii so that brings me on to the next topic which is if you have a flow hive you need to use a queen excluder i'm not a huge fan of queen excluders i don't use foundation in my frames and so that means that bees build honeycomb in whatever size they want to and when that happens i found that my drones sometimes are even larger than the typical drone and they get stuck in a queen excluder and i find a lot of dead drones in my cleaning squares i've also sometimes found that my bees don't bring in as much honey and they're a lot slower to move up into the honey supers to fill it up with honey when i use a queen explorer so having like being forced to use a queen excluder with the flow hive is something i'm not a huge fan of but not uh it's just a personal preference and not something that makes this uh piece of equipment you know useless all right so now we are getting into the biggest and most important part about the flow hive i really wish they mentioned this in their website i know why they don't because it can be a deterrent for people to buy but huge really really super most important this thing is heavy okay so i have a little scale here with me when i um measure this frame we're looking at a little over six and a half ounces perfect when i measure the flow frame um two pounds three ounces and there are seven of these frames in here and then you look at the heaviness of the box the box is made out of a harder wood it has to be because it has lots of cutouts they have the windows not on this side on my side there's a window so you can look at the side of the frame without having to open the hive and that's not so much of a problem but the side where you harvest honey from there are two cutouts there's a cutout up top so that you can pull this little plastic piece out and crank it open there is also a cutout down below so that the honey can flow out so because of these two cut outs the joints are very compromised the box does not last as long as a typical wooden box would for a langstroth style hive and it needs to be made out of harder wood so uh empty flow hive is a little over 20 pounds whereas an empty line show style hive this my empty landscape style deep box is 11 pounds so before you even put honey in this thing it's already heavier when totally full the flow hive on their website says that each frame is about six and a half pounds so you're looking at about a 55 to 58 pound box when this flow super is full if you were to buy just a regular honey super it's about 35 pounds when full and if you were to buy a medium sized honey super it would be about 45 pounds when full so that is really the big concern i have when people say they want to buy a flow hive and that's because most of the people that have told me that they're buying one or did buy one are older or they're retired and they want something that so that they can keep bees but they want it to be easier and you know they're not so they're fine with paying extra money for it if it means be keeping a more attainable hobby for them but the problem is is that the way that they want beekeeping to be easier is actually um it's twice as hard with the flow hive because you can take a frame out of a beehive give it a good shake get most of the bees off i take my hand to get swat the remaining bees off bring it into my kitchen and then squish the honey with a fork um you don't have to stand out here and crank a key for it to flow into a jar for beekeeping to be easier they want it to be something that they're not out in the sun and the heat on their feet checking this beehive and it to be too too hard but actually the flow hive i dread checking the flow hive that i have i avoid it i don't check it as often as my other beehives and that is because it is so darn heavy during the honey season when this thing is full i don't want to pick up a 58 pound box i don't it's heavy i'm hot when i was pregnant i definitely wasn't going to be picking it up towards the end of my pregnancy and so that's something you really have to consider this thing is horribly heavy so if you're looking to do this with kids or if you have any trouble lifting something that's over 40 pounds do not get a flow height and even though it makes beekeeping easier when it comes to honey harvest day you're harvesting honey like once a year maybe twice a year but you're opening that hive almost every week for spring summer and early fall and so it's making every single inspection harder but making that one day out of the year easier so in my opinion does that mean it keeps it easier no no not at all if you add it up it's making it harder for you okay so um some other things uh the box i don't know what the deal is with the handholds of the box i have a ruler here it is a little over a quarter of an inch deep the handholds of the box and the langstroth hive i have from daydant.com is um a little over a half an inch so i'm not sure why the handholds are so shallow i personally have really small hands but you have a box that is twice as heavy almost twice as heavy as a shallow honey super and you have the hand holes are so shallow they need to be bigger and they're not they really should have given you if for some reason it's not good for the box i don't know they don't want to compromise the sides by making it shallower they should have just given hand holds that you attach on your own um and then which brings me on to my next point which is there's no handhold on this side of the box usually when you open the beehive you stand on the long side of the box you start with the first frame and then when you're done checking the hive you pick it up and you put it on the ground since there's no hand hold on this side because this is where the honey harvesting cutouts are you have to move to this side to the shorter end of the hive pick it up put it on the ground and for those of you that aren't used to beekeeping and this is new for you this might not be a problem because it's not a habit you're into but for people that already have these it is something that can be a little annoying that you just have to do things differently for this one beehive that you have and along those same lines you don't pull a frame out by the ears like you would these wooden frames so what you have to do is they have this wire piece that you pull the frames out of now since the spring can get to be over six and a half pounds and you have those little piece of wire to pull it out by not always the most comfortable not ideal but not awful okay next on to the honey harvesting if you have just a regular lunchtime style hive you're gonna have to pull the frames out you're gonna have to get the beads off the frame you're gonna have to put them into a safe place that doesn't have these while you get the rest of your frames bring them somewhere else where you have an extractor or you're gonna use the crush and strain method it's almost always takes a half a day if you have like two or three hives or four um you have more than that you're looking at maybe a full day if you have health maybe a little bit less um but it's almost always a day long process you have to clean the extractor you have to get your honey harvesting equipment set up everything needs to be cleaned the day before so that it's dry because water is the only thing that will really make water and exposure to air and moisture will is don't are the only things that will make your honey go bad so when harvesting it's just a process it's preparation the day before it's harvesting it's clean up it's bringing this stuff into your house and so that's where the flow hive comes in handy and can be helpful what you do is you still have to pull the frame out you still have to say okay this flame is capped and so therefore that honey is ready to harvest if your frame is not capped the honey does not have enough moisture evaporated from it so that it will not go bad so you still have to pull it out you still have to look at it um you'll see the cells here filling up which gives you an idea of what the frame looks like but i've seen these cells be empty and the rest of the frame be full so it's not always a good judge of whether your frame is ready so you put a key in here you turn it and honey will pour out of here now the first time i harvested from the flow hive i made the mistake of thinking it would go the way it looks in their videos and what happened was tons of bees tried to climb in this tube they tried to climb they flew into my jar of honey but mostly what i was didn't think about but was the most annoying part was that it just took forever for it to finish dripping into the jar i mean it's honey it's a thicker liquid you want to tilt the hive towards the direction of the jar to encourage the honey to pour out faster but still it's going to take a while the end part is going to take a while to just drip into your jars i have a youtube video there's a link in the show description to how i use a five gallon bucket drill a hole in the lid bought a couple yards of plastic tube put the long plastic tube in here let it drip into a bucket i crank it i go into the house i come back an hour later i do it to another frame and it is so much better than letting it drip into a jar and having bees fly into the jar and standing there as it slowly drips if you don't let all of it drip out it's just going to pull up inside your frame so you really want all of the honey to drip out this isn't like oh i want honey for my breakfast today let me go out and crank it turn it on and pour some honey into a jar turn it off and go back in the house once it's um once you've started it like you've already cracked those cells and it's pouring out so you really want to let it finish um and you can crank it back but um you really just want it to finish or else you're just going to have honey dripping out of here and you could be attracting other bees you're contracting the bees from the hive next to it so use the bucket and the tube method it's a hell of a lot easier than standing out here holding a jar and finally i mentioned this briefly but a little bit more about this in your frames in the flow hive you not only have foundation but you have your cone built out in plastic as opposed to bees building their own honeycomb i am a little on the fence about how i feel about this i kind of think it's good for the bees to build honeycomb and secrete that wax it's one of the jobs of the worker bees within the hive um but with the flow hive that part isn't necessary they're just filling up the cells now since the comb is made out of plastic you don't have to worry about um getting destroyed by insects or rodents over the winter time when you're storing it but the one thing you do have to worry about that i did have trouble with to start was getting the bees to even accept these frames if you put it on a hive that's busy and full there's a big nectar season going on these are bringing in lots of food and this is their only option to store it in they're going to put their honey in here and they're going to put it in pretty quickly they're going to clean it out and they're going to fill it up and cap it up and that's what i saw them do but the first year they didn't touch this i put an empty float box on my hive and then i put on empty honey super above that they completely bypassed the flow box didn't touch it at all filled up entirely a 40 a 35 pound honey super above it built out the comb it would have empty frames in it no foundation no drawn out calm they filled it up with comb they built the comb they filled it up with honey capped it and then they um started to move down to the flow frames but didn't really do much honey season ended and my flow box was empty i've heard a lot of people complain that they're having trouble getting the bees to bring in honey and to accept these flow frames so um some people will melt some wax and put a teeny little bit on just the edges you don't want to gunk it up and break the frame but a little bit on just the tips to help encourage the bees to build up i took one of the frames out and put a frame of honey in there um it's not as fat as the flow frame but it was just fine and that helped to encourage the bees to come up you can take off your queen excluder if you're confident the queen won't go up in there but it really needs to be on during the time of year when the bees are bringing in tons of food and they'll put it in almost anything if you put it on towards the end of the season there's a really slim chance that they're going to take to it and of course if you live in an area where there's never a big nectar season because i've had bees in lots of places even here in hawaii there's just not much food for them there's a lot of other beekeepers nearby and they will never take to these frames because it's just it really just kind of requires them to have a little bit more of a honey flow coming in okay so that's my experience with the flow hive um it to sum it all up i really don't recommend this for people that are looking to like become self-sufficient or looking to save money by having bees themselves instead of buying honey or for people that have difficulty lifting heavy equipment or might potentially have difficulty lifting heavy stuff anything over 40 pounds over the next few years this isn't my recommendation if you're looking for something so you don't have to keep bees this is not it you still have to keep bees the same exact way you would with any other style beehive it just makes the honey harvesting part easier it is over 20 pounds heavier when full than a full honey super is um the handholds are more shallow the box doesn't last as long i haven't found that these frames last as long it is a lot more expensive and if you're going to have more than two hives i would not go with flow hives because it is more expensive if you only have one or two bee hives it's not that much more expensive than buying a regular wooden beehive the time that the flow hive has come in handy and i do recommend having a flow hive is if you have bees in an area where um you do not have access to a kitchen i have a flow hive at a hotel that we keep bees for we do have access to a kitchen but it's not ideal it's not ideal to bring those honey supers so far into the kitchen um it it kind of we have to go to the staff cafeteria some of the staff members are afraid of bees and then they don't want to be down there and then there are bees flying around and flying into the lights and so having a flow hive means that i can hook up a tube to a bucket and just have some frames emptying out while i check another beehive i can do that to another frame even like the next time we're checking the hives i don't need access to a kitchen i don't need a staff of people helping me i can just they just have a four feet hives at this property so i can harvest the honey and not have to worry about bringing it to a kitchen for all that stuff i don't enjoy checking the hives because i hate having to pick up this flow box but it makes the harvesting a whole lot easier so um even if you have a beehive say at your school having to harvest honey at your school might be a big mess a big sticky mess and so a flow hive might be a lot easier you can also maybe expose the kids to harvesting a lot easier than you would if you were bringing it in and doing the crush and strain method or using an extractor but i don't recommend it if you're looking to have more than two bee hives or if you have difficulty lifting heavy stuff would i buy a flow hive i wouldn't i have 20 bee hives i am not going to invest that much money in the flow equipment i'm not going to stand there while all these hives are emptying out frame by frame and it would cost me so much money i wouldn't make anything in the end after paying for all that equipment and having to pay for broken frames and all that stuff um really wish that i i really feel bad for the people that buy one and then figure out how heavy it is and realize that it's a little bit beyond uh what what they can handle i wish that that part was more made more aware in people's marketing i get i mean i've met people who have bought a flow hive because they said that they don't want to open the beehive and they don't want to care for the bees they just want the honey and that makes me really sad that that is a misconception people have whether that is the full company's fault or people just not really reading stuff and maybe a little bit of both but um you know what what the flow hive did was it just i think may be keeping the scene more accessible to more people and so and and they made a more attractive beehive and they made an attractive ad and they made a nicer website and so you know you can't fault them for taking a hobby that was you know gaining in popularity and but still the suppliers weren't really making shopping for beekeeping equipment fun and they just made it fun so if you found this video helpful i hope you click the you know whatever thumbs up arrow hit subscribe and then hit the bell icon if you want to be notified about new videos we put one up every week and if you have a flow hive or considering one if you have questions or if you have things that you love or hate about the flow hive that i forgot please add them into the comments or any updates about what's going on with the flow company because i know that they have recently started using a different kind of wood option they're offering a different kind of wood option and smaller size options for people so i know they're trying to make things more affordable i really have no idea why they sell this beehive with one brood box and one honey super it should really be a second honey super without flow frames and two brood boxes i think they're really encouraging bad beekeeping practices by selling it with these two boxes um i think it's my assumption is it's just because they wanted wanted to keep the price under 800 when they were first selling it but that's just a guess of mine so thanks for watching all the resources are down in the show notes below bye

Channel: Beekeeping Made Simple

Views: 12,374

Rating: 3.9961977 out of 5

Keywords: flow hive, flow hive review, review of the flow hive, should I buy a flow hive, flow hive honey harvest, is beekeeping easier with the flow hive

Id: l7PuoCM3-Wo

Length: 34min 33sec (2073 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021