Is the Flow Hive / Flow Hive 2 worth it? My opinion on the Flow Hive vs. Langstroth

hi and welcome back to the channel in today's video we are going to be talking about the flow hive now this is one of the most common questions that i get in my comments and that is what's my opinion of the flow hive now if you've been to this channel you realize i've got two of them one that i bought for a thousand dollars and one that i built for about well at the time it was about 300 now i think it costs around 400 to build one um but the flow hive was my gateway to beekeeping if it wasn't for the flow hive i wouldn't be a beekeeper today so if you haven't if you're the unicorn if you're the one person out there who is interested in beekeeping you've looked up b videos and you saw this and said flow hive what's the fly if you haven't heard of the flow hive everybody else be patient i'm going to explain it to the unicorn that's a compliment by the way the unicorn is the one individual who hasn't heard anything about flive anyways so the flow hive the flow hive was created by stuart and cedar anderson in australia it is the or it has been touted as the first major innovation in beekeeping in 150 years prior to this most people used langstroth hives or developed i believe in the 1800s maybe before i'm not exactly sure but this is the first major innovation in beekeeping in a 150 years now stuart and cedar anderson went out to a gofundme website i'm not sure which one maybe it's called gofundme i'm not sure but they went out and they asked for seventy thousand dollars to start their company to bring their invention to market and people saw what it was immediately and they ended up getting 12 to 13 million dollars to bring it to market and they have brought it to market the thing about the flow hive is is it costs 1 000 or thereabouts about 700 but by the time you ship it to the united states and buy all the gear and everything it's about a thousand dollar investment to become a beekeeper with the flow hive system but again this was my introduction to beekeeping if it wasn't for the flow hive i would not be a beekeeper today so i ordered my flow hive about three seasons ago this is my third season as a beekeeper and i placed my order and while it was on order it took a while before it would show up there were a lot of people ordering they were back ordered they had to ship from australia and in that time i lied jumped on youtube and i learned as much as i could about beekeeping and specifically as much as i could about the flow hive and that's where i was introduced to beekeepers like frederick dunn that was the first honey flow extraction that i'd seen from the flow hive was on frederick dunn's youtube channel uh that also introduced me to jim at veto farm now jim's never actually put the flow frames on his flow hive in a meaningful way and maybe he will someday but maybe he won't and that's some of the things that we're going to talk about today um because this is a very expensive investment if you're going to become a beekeeper so that goes back to is it worth it what's my opinion my opinion is is that if a thousand dollar flow hive gets you into beekeeping then it's worth it now if you're going to have a couple of garden hives and you don't plan on having any more than one or two hives and you want some very pretty very well-built hives in your yard these might be the way to go instead of getting langstroth but let me caution you you are still going to have to get into the beehive see that was a problem when flow hive first started they were marketed as honey on tap you kind of got the impression you never had to get into the beehive and to be honest that's what i thought when i bought my flow hive when i pushed the submit button on the on the shopping cart and i purchased it i thought this is going to be great it's going to be like honey coming out of a keg i'm never going to have to get into the beehive i'm only going to have to deal with the bees when i initially put them in there after that i go around to the back the bees don't mind i'm tearing up their comb and getting the honey out everything was going to be great and i think they've changed their marketing campaign since to let you know that this is a way to extract honey differently but you still have to manage your bees and you still have to manage your bees um this frame if you're not familiar with it the way that it works is the honeycomb is pre-built it's built out of plastic and that's also something that a lot of people a lot of the critics say hey you shouldn't bee keep with plastic um but i can tell you i've also been using plastic foundation in my langstroth hives since i started beekeeping so in my in my opinion and i'm just a third year noob i'm up i'm a new beekeeper i've not noticed the bees having any problem whatsoever with the plastic i believe it's all food grade it's covered in beeswax i think it's going to be good but the difference between this frame and that frame for a langstroth is that this comb is completely built out however the comb is in two pieces and when you insert the key to extract your honey after the bees have filled and cap these frames what it does is it will break the comb in half vertically and that will allow the honey to flow down and out of the hive and that is a great thing if you don't have an extractor or you don't want to destroy the comb to get the honey this works wonderfully and again if you're only going to have one or two hives this works wonderfully the question is utility you're going to spend about a thousand dollars on this hive getting it to america and getting everything you need to be keep i think it's 700 and some i'm not exactly sure the price right now i just know that it was expensive like it was around a thousand dollars when i bought mine um and in order for this to pay itself off it's going to have to last quite a long time now they are well built i'll tell you that and if you take care of your frames and i believe you will if you spend a thousand dollars on a setup you're going to take care of your frames they should last quite a while i've not noticed anything bad yet everything's very very well made um but there are some things that you're going to have to be aware of and those things are that you are going to have to manage your colony you are going to have to get down onto the brood box you are going to have to inspect and look for disease look for varroa mites look for uh new queens you're gonna have to decide whether or not you're going to split you're gonna have to make sure that everything is going the way that it should be going down in the brood chamber so that you can get some honey in your flow hive you're also going to have to leave some honey on the hive over winter and i don't know if anybody now some people may i don't know if anybody leaves their flow hives sit out on their beehive throughout the winter in the cold and i don't know how that is going to affect the flow frames themselves what you will probably end up doing is you'll probably end up having a medium or a deep sitting above your brood chamber and below your flow hive with standard length straw frames that you will allow the bees to fill and keep that honey over the winter or to store sugar syrup if you take all their honey but they work for you should let them keep some of their own honey anyways um you are still going to have to manage your bees you are still going to have to get into the hive um it's something that's going to have to happen so if you're thinking about getting a flow hive thinking that you're going to get honey out of the hive like a keg it will do that if you think you're going to get a flow hive so that you don't have to get into your bees and manage the colony it's not going to do that you're still going to have to get into the into the beehive and manage your colony um i do have a video we'll put it up there that shows you how you can build your own flow hive for about it was 300 at the time now it's about 400 prices have gone up a little bit but you can build your own flow hive a lot cheaper and you will only have to purchase the frames themselves from honeyflow.com so that should save you a little bit of money everything else can be done with a standard langstroth box so with all of that said we talk about value value the utility of it a flow hive again we've said was about a thousand dollars when it's all said and done and shipped to the united states maybe a little bit less now i'm not sure what sales to have going on but you can buy an entire setup the bottom board all the way to the top and everything you need usually including a smoker and a veil and a in gloves and a hive tool with a length straw set up for probably about 300 out there there's a lot of websites that will sell the bundle for for very very cheap and that is a very inexpensive way to get into beekeeping i can also tell you that when you become a beekeeper you are going to have to deal with splitting your hives your hives are going to want to multiply your bees are going to want to multiply naturally and propagate their species um and as beekeepers we try to prevent swarms and keep as many bees as we can in the apiary because more bees people more honey right and every time your bee swarm up to half of your colony can fly away which can really slow down your honey production and what that means is you're probably going to end up buying more and more hives so you start with one needle you'll have two you have two you're going to end up with four then eight then so on and so forth when i started my first year i started with one flow hive that i got from australia and one standard langstroth hive by the end of the season i had built my second flow hive and purchased another setup for langstroth so i had four hives at the end of my first season at the end of my second season which was last year i believe i had eight hives here and two up the street so that's 10 and right now i'm expanding again so the bees want to expand and if you want to have nothing but a flow hive setup that's going to cost you a lot of money so again you're going to end up with some langstroth hives if money means anything to you because running a flow hive operation is very very expensive i didn't say it was bad it's just very very expensive they are very good hives especially when showing your friends your relatives your neighbors you bring them over you show them the flow hive and that gets them interested in becoming beekeepers again this was my gateway to beekeeping if it wasn't for the flow hive i wouldn't have gone out and found the videos on youtube i wouldn't have uh found the people with all of the knowledge that has led me to become a more conscientious beekeeper and it really brings you into the world of animal husbandry now of course these are bees and not a flock of sheep or a herd of cattle but it is animal husbandry you feel responsible for the health and well-being of your colonies and you want to take care of them to the best of your ability uh you will also become more in tune with the environment you will know what flowers are blooming at what time and and what nectar is available and what pollen is available and you will if you're the first beekeeper in your area you're going to notice a change in the area where you live you're going to notice that the year after you've become a beekeeper there are more flowers blooming in your area these are the things that happen when you become a beekeeper so i highly encourage it and again this was my gateway into beekeeping the flow hive the last difference and the last thing that i guess i should speak about on the flow hive is that one benefit of the flow hive over the langstroth hives outside of being able to just get your honey on tap is that your honey can taste differently in each one of the frames okay so your your bees are going to fill frames sequentially for the most part and they may be on peach trees one day they may be on blueberry bushes the next day they may be on apple trees or pear trees the next day or clover or dandelion and what that is going to do is it's going to give you a different flavored honey in each one of the flow hives and then when you're ready to harvest you would put them in individual jars you can not only see the difference in color but you can also taste the difference and that's something that as a beekeeper that also has langstroth setups when i am extracting from my langstroth hives it all goes into the extractor it all comes out and goes into a bucket and it's kind of homogenized now that doesn't mean my honey doesn't taste good it doesn't mean that it doesn't taste as good it's just homogenized and and i can't as readily pick out the note of blueberry or the note of strawberry or the note of peach or the note of apple or whatever flowers the bees were on that day that is a difference so that's another benefit that you're going to have with the flow hive so all in all my opinion of the flow hive my opinion is is that it's worth it at least it's worth it to have one maybe two and i have two um because if you are not a beekeeper and you're thinking about becoming a beekeeper this will get you there if you like to have honey that tastes specifically like the flowers that the bees were on when they gathered it this will get you there if you are looking for a novelty beehive that looks nice in your garden this will get you there uh it is a very important innovation in beekeeping and i think that cedar and stuart anderson in australia have earned their place in the history books with this hive so with all that said i hope i've answered some of your questions i hope i answered the main question and that is what do i think of the flow hive i like it um but if you like this video do me a favor give me a thumbs up if you have something to say by all means please comment and i understand that the flow hive sometimes is a controversial issue with beekeepers i wasn't trying to walk the middle of the road but there are advantages and disadvantages to both langstroth and flow hives so there you go so leave me a comment let me know what you think and by all means if you haven't subscribed to the channel do me a favor hit the subscribe button ring the bell to be notified of my new content i try to drop a video every friday at three o'clock and we try to keep it light and have fun here and i hope that you come along and join me in my journey of beekeeping with all that said have a great day be happy and i'll see you next time thanks for [Music] watching [Music] you

Channel: Bug Farmer

Views: 1,205

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: flow hive, flowhive, beekeeping, beekeeper, backyard beekeeping, innovation, woodworking, gardening, sustainable landscape, insects, apiary, honeybee, honey, pollinators, how to feed bees, feeding bees, beekeeping 101, learn beekeeping, become a beekeeper, build an apiary, keep bees, honeybees, honey flow, tap hives, prepper, sustain, sustainable living, urban farming, backyard farming, bug farmer, Chickens, raising chickens, backyard chickens, beehive heater, heated beehive, Flow hive 2

Id: 4SMdxN-1ITg

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021