FLOW HIVE - Success Story | Are they Right for You?

hey friends welcome back to the bee yard i'm a little ways away because the bees are being very defensive today they have been for probably the last week or so i think resources are really starting to be a little bit hard to come by or a little more selective so the bees are being a lot more defensive than they have been most of the year this is hive number three that you're looking at here close to us this is my by far my strongest colony this year that third box up on on the stack there that is a flow hive it's a first generation flow hive we bought it three years ago i think rachel bought it for us or maybe yeah three years ago i think rachel bought it for us and we used it the first year we had it we didn't get anything out of it the bees never did anything with it the second year we didn't even use it this year's our third year using it and they're using it the bees are using it they um they've been took them quite a while but they finally sealed up all the cells they've been storing honey in it and i checked it um about a week ago and some of the middle frames were about 90 percent and two days ago i checked it again and i had four frames right through the middle there completely filled capped waxed ready to go ready to harvest tonight we're gonna go and we're gonna pull three of them and i'm gonna take you guys along and tell you what our thoughts are on the flow hive now that we actually get to use it for its intended purpose all right we're good the lighting tonight is so challenging because the sun is so bright my hives are white and it just keeps it keeps doing crazy crazy stuff but we do have to i have to get going on this because we're approaching eight o'clock [Music] and i will lose light at some point i also i really wish the bees weren't so aggressive as they are tonight because i sometimes i really hate wearing my my veil when i do videos where i'm talking with you because it feels impersonal to me so my apologies for that but the bees are quite defensive um my setup let's go over that real quick i run 10 frame langstroth hive bodies bottom brood chamber second brood chamber got a metal queen excluder here flow hive seven frame flow hive so there's one two three four five six seven which is compatible with ten frame langstroth if you run eight frame then you need the smaller flow hive top box is another super um brand new frames in it they they work so hard on this one i threw this on there the other day just to say hey if you guys want something to do you can start drawing out these frames for me i doubt they're gonna store anything on it but if i can at least come to draw some of them frames for me this year so i hope for next year we'll uh we'll run with it my little shelf down here if you can see this i threw this together last night it's just some 1 by 6 planks screwed together and then there's some brackets on the inside and i just screw it to the high body i can move it up or down depending on what i'm doing right now it's positioned for half gallon size jars which is what we're gonna use tonight so i in the interest of full disclosure um this one this one this one and this one are ready to harvest you'll see in some spots here on the ends hopefully it's showing up on some of the end cells aren't actually filled all the way or capped but the very next row over is so as i was saying in full disclosure this frame right here me and rachel harvested this one last night without you guys we didn't bring you along i'm sorry but i i'm not i'm not a big fan of filming videos when i'm doing something the very first time so i wanted to do one last night get some experience under my belt so when i bring you guys with me i can show you exactly what's going on and what i know so far so there's a few components tonight we're gonna do this one this one and this one and with gallon half gallon size mason jars i can't do this one and this one at the same time because they're too close together so i'm gonna do this one and this one first and there's little plugs up here at the top that block off the key entrance i guess i probably should have done a better uh or i guess i should say this isn't a here's all the full details on the flow hive it's more of a let's harvest honey from the flow hive and show you guys how it works and my thoughts on them now that i've actually got to use them so i need to grab my tubes so with these caps out this is where the key goes there's a long key like this that slides in here and when you turn that that's what opens these frames and down here the little plugs the bees definitely will propolize them a lot so bring some pliers with you there's always a little bit of honey that's going to come out so let's pull them both now and get the the drip action going and then you want to make sure where these tubes go in here is clean so you get a good seal yeah that looks good and these little tubes they have a little nub right there and that little nub is what goes on the bottom and it fits and locks right in there so there we go we got our jars set up we got our tubes in we pulled our caps here and i think it's time for the honey to flow oh no i'm making a mess back there it's okay so yeah everything looks good let me get you guys in a good position and i'll i'll crack this first one this first one open well i'll crack one of them open all right i think i'm good i think i got a decent enough position with the lighting so this key this slides all the way into the back of the hive and when you turn it it's going to take every single cell within that frame and try to shift them all at once it's not a good idea to try to do the whole thing at once it's best to start about three or four inches at a time and only do a few of them let's back it off a little yeah the bees really sealed that one good okay so it's vertical now so it's doing the ones closest to us now we can slide it a little farther and go go a little farther there we go i'm starting to see some action right here on the end and uh all the bees right around here are gonna start freaking out and they're just really good to start moving around like crazy and go a little deeper now we can go all the way in oh that back part's tight okay all right we got honey rolling let's get this next one going so we got two so while this is where i'm working on this the um i could have pulled these frames you can on a flow hive you can pull the frames out just like any other normal colony or box you can pull the frames out and look at them and inspect them just as you would anything else and i very well could have pulled these tonight and showed you the cappings and said okay here look this is what it looks like when they're fully capped but because i just did it a few days ago and it really really really disturbs the bees i did not want to do that tonight because i don't want these everywhere right now because i don't want them in this honey so i will i do have a couple pictures i'll try to throw them in so you can see kind of what it looks like so these are fully open now and ready to go yep it's beautiful some sun shining like this terrible for filming but beautiful it's like it's got all the bubbles for makes it look like there's glitter in it and you will end up with there'll be little pieces of wax in there and a few pieces of pollen in there but it absolutely hurts nothing it's it's perfectly fine to consume some argue it's actually even good for you it's just pure raw unfiltered honey bunch of geese flying overhead hey hey hey go away so last night when we did this it was a little bit cooler than it is tonight and it took probably a good 30 minutes to drain the whole thing tonight it's a little bit warmer so i'm hoping it goes a little bit faster i did bring uh some extra i have no one more jar normally a single frame from a flow hive will yield about a half a gallon of honey so i have three jars here plus i have an extra if we need it for overflow there you go i got you leaving a little closer so i guess some some things to keep in mind once you crack these frames open using that key up here at the top you can't turn it off that seal is broken and even if i inserted the key and turned it back the other direction so the key has a spot at the bottom to open it and a spot at the top to close it if i put that key in the top and i closed it right now those frames are going to shift back but all that propolis and wax that had been put in there to seal them is gone so all that honey is just still gonna leak so make sure you bring that my suit's not even zipped up make sure you bring enough jars more jars than you think you're gonna need because once this jar is full if i don't have another you're you're you're either stick your mouth up there or where you're still gonna start losing honey um i guess i can go over a few other things while we're waiting um so what are my thoughts on the flow hive like i said we tried it the uh very first year and we had zero luck with it the bees would go up there and they'd mess around a little bit and they basically i either didn't have a strong enough colony or the bees just didn't really like it last year our colonies were weak we tried to super them but they never did anything last year we got zero honey last year this year we decided okay let's just pick one of the hives um in the early spring or early summer when we put the supers on they were all about the same now this one is definitely one of the strongest which is the one that ended up with the flow hive and the bees would start going up there but it really felt like they weren't doing a whole lot so i think on two or two occasions i came out and i pulled the frames and i would spray them i had a spray bottle with um with water and about 20 honey and you shake it up and i sprayed all the frames down with it let them dry and then put them back in and that draws the bees up in there and it kind of trains them that hey when you have a an excluder here you need to teach the bees or train the bees that it's okay to go through this thing you can fit you can do it so by spraying down the frames it kind of helped draw the bees up there at least i think it did either that or i was way more patient with them this year i'm not really sure but it took them quite a long time to go through and seal all those little cells because they're they're actually separated and they'll have a little crack all the way around them and the bees got to go and fill that crack on every single cell and then fill it and then come back and cap it with wax and so we would open up the back and we'd look back here and it's like okay they're not doing anything and you look in the little side window and it's like okay yeah there's a whole bunch of bees up here but i don't know what they're doing and that process is just it requires so much patience and sometimes i think the windows make it make the patients harder because you see bees there and you see bees working and you know they're doing something but deep inside of those frames in the center that's where the real work is starting in the center and that's where they're going to usually start storing their nectar first and you can't really see that so we were patient and we waited and we waited and then a couple weeks ago we saw a couple little glimmers of oh look there's nectar in here in the back and then the next day there was more nectar and the more nectar eventually there was like a whole thing of nectar it's like okay we need to pull these things and see if they're capped because if they're capped they're ready to go so even though the back wasn't capped when you pulled the frame 98 of the cells were all capped and ready to go so could i have been more patient and waited them for them to seal all these back ones as well probably but once the bulk the 98 percent of the honey is capped you know it's been dehydrated enough that the water content is low enough and you should be good to go because they're really slowing down now i wish i could get this third one rolling but i don't think all right so we're really starting to come to a close here it's been about another about 10 or 15 minutes well if there's there's still going to be some honey in there that's going to it's going to drip down and that's okay nice man now i've got honey on my gloves you can tell falls coming when the yellow jackets come out so i promised you some thoughts or my my thoughts on the flow hive um like i said the first year didn't work for us second year we didn't even try it this year we put it on a random hive and it's worked out great for us um let's see there's a couple channels that i want to encourage you to check out and i'll try to post the actual links to the videos that are that are in my head and that is vino farmvino and frederick dunn now vino farm there up in vermont i want to say quite sure and uh he's done a lot of analysis on their climate and their flow of nectar and their dearth of when there's not a flow and he's basically come to the conclusion that flow hives really aren't for him they they don't fit his his sister's bees here i have to put my suit back on they don't really fit him with his with his ecosystem with his bees and his timing of everything so he's kind of pushed him to the side and said i'm not going to use these frederick dunn on the other hand who lives in pennsylvania farther south almost in line with michigan here where we are frederick loves them i think he has about five of them now and he's quite fond of them and he has quite a few videos on them goes through the harvesting process probably in way more detail than i can do um plus he has way more experience than i have with them so for us um would i recommend this to a brand new beekeeper no i don't think i could recommend it to a new beekeeper brand new beekeeper the first year second year you need to focus on your bees you'll need a super because you don't ever want your bees to become honey bound which is where the queen doesn't have anywhere to lay you need supers for for storage if the bees need it but to invest four or five hundred dollars in the flow hive your first year or second year i probably would advise against it for most people spend those first couple years on your bees getting to know your bees observing learning how to do proper inspections mic checks treating for mites getting your colonies through winter focus on that stuff first get yourself a good foundation so focus on that especially if you're brand new the um the first year when we harvested honey we had a traditional supers and we harvested that honey we don't own an extractor so we harvested that honey by taking the frames and we scraped all the comb off all that wax that those bees built up and drew all that comb out we destroyed it all crushed it filtered all of that to get the honey then we kept the beeswax we kept the honey but next the next following year when we go to put supers back on those hives are just about bare the bees basically have to start from scratch so if we for four or five hundred dollars in a flow hive you can also buy an extractor which means you can pull your supers cut the caps off extract the honey out and then you have drawn comb already for the next year so the bees don't have to start from scratch so there's definitely a lot of things to weigh pros and cons do they have to start over from scratch with the flow hive well those little cells when you crack those cells to let that honey drain out and you put it back together they gotta go in and seal that that whole line all the way around it's not as much work as drawing out a whole comb but there's there's still work involved so keep all of that stuff in mind and i guess from my perspective my advice flow hive do we like it yes we enjoyed it this year it worked and we're thinking about maybe buying another one for next year i think they're totally out of stock right now i checked their website and they're they're gone um so maybe this winner will pick one up that way we have another one for next year but what we spend for one of these we could buy an extractor and stick with traditional so we'll think about it over the winter and before you pull the trigger on something like this do your research we're getting close oh i see the uh every now and then in between the frames you'll see something white moving across and they're pulling the caps off so they can get inside of there and start cleaning out what's left of the honey absolutely awesome i love honey my favorite peanut butter and honey sandwiches been eating them since i was a little kid so with these three jars here tonight plus the one we had that we did last night when we did our trial run so i knew what i was doing when i filmed tonight a full a full seven frame flow hive could yield you three and a half gallons so half gallon per frame times seven three and a half gallons we basically have two gallons so far at this point this year we'll be patient on these ones we'll see if they fill them up if you have questions about the flow hive something i didn't answer i feel like i talked a lot which i do when i do beekeeping videos because i'm passionate about it but if i didn't answer any questions for you post them in the comment section down below and i'll do my best and we need to come back out here and do more bee stuff i did feel like i did a lot of beekeeping videos last year and hardly any this year but i don't know we're really busy this time of year see you guys on the next video hey this honey is for me you

Channel: That 1870's Homestead

Views: 17,320

Rating: 4.9719439 out of 5

Keywords: flow hive, flowhive, flow hive honey harvest, honey collection, beekeeping, backyard beekeeping, flow hive impressions, flow hive success, flow hive review, flow hive harvest, flow hive setup, honey super, flow frames, bee keeping, keeping bees, honey bees, beginner beekeeping, beekeeping equipment, flow hive how it works, honey on tap, flow hive review 2020, flow frame beehive, flow frames bee, flow frame review, flow frame super, modern homesteading, homesteading

Id: PlvgYJ5IRSU

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 08 2020