Original Flow Hive vs Chinese Copy Auto-flow (and much more info)

well I thought I'd share my experiences with the flow hive with the YouTube community I purchased the original flow hive a long time ago when they first offered it and bought some more of those original flow frames and supers from Australia and unfortunately I have quite a few hives so as a result of that paying $500 a super is just too much so I experimented this last year with the the Chinese version of it I think it's called Auto frame and what I found was I had in my experiment I had for the supers that were filled with honey this spring and two of them they filled two Australian and two Chinese and they filled them equally well they filled them all the way to the top on both of the chinese and the australian and then when I did my draining of the flow I've I found that there was no difference in the ease of use between the Chinese and the Australian as a result of that I think paying one fifth of price in with the Chinese frames is a pretty good economic decision I'm sorry that Flo has priced their their hives so high that a lot of people aren't interested and I've even trying them out but if you do try them out you won't be able to afford very many of them if you've got quite a few hives anyway on top of finding out that the Chinese frames are equally as effective I wanted to share with you some of my experiences with the flow to maybe help you get past some of the problems I ran into one of the issues when you get your your flow is is the the frames when they come out of the box they have two caps you see that there's a cap at the top and then a cap at the bottom to keep the honey into the frame until you're ready to to drain the problem with these caps when they come out of the boxes they're clean and they're small and you're outside in your apiary trying to trying to do what you need to do and these things will get very easily lost and I had a couple of three occasions where I spent a lot of time trying to find a cap that had fallen on the ground and because they're small and clear they're very difficult so my recommendation as soon as you get your frames out take those caps put them on a piece of cardboard spray-paint them with some fluorescent or some high visibility paint and save yourself a lot of problems later because typically these these flow frames will come with only one cap in one cover and you can't get more there's just they're just not available about by themselves so make sure that you do this immediately before you have a chance to lose them now the one I'm showing you on the video here is actually a Chinese version and they sell them mostly online as the frames just the seven frames so you're going to have to take a deep super and modify that fortunately I'll give you a link to how to do that they do send you some some dimensions in this kind of thing but you're you're going to need a little woodworking too to accommodate the frames in your deep super first of course you're going to need to to cut this a lot notch up here for the for the cap so this is what were you going to put your key to open the frames up and then you're going to have to take a cover cut a cover out like I've got here to cover up the remainder of the frames and this is also where you're going to be pulling out your your honey now as far as the the top is concerned the lid most lids and if you buy them what they call the migration lid where you are going to have a or a piece of wood over each end here another front in the back are going to be a problem so what I did is I actually adjusted my lids some of them if they had the front in the back cleat I take the back cleat off and I put it on the on the top instead of the bottom and that's that supported the the warping that might take place on the the plywood but it also accommodated me to where I could get at the about the covers where the keys are going to be going in so you're going to need to adjust your top if you use that personally I like the migration covers the the just standard piece of wood over over the over the super rather than the telescoping cover telescoping covers are heavy they require two pieces you've got an inner cover and an outer cover and they don't allow me to do what I really enjoy doing and found to be most effective which is feeding the bees in the spring to get them ready for a honey flow the problem with the telescoping cover is you can't go in from the top and I have found because I've been beekeeping for a lot of years is that is that I've tried just about every form of feeding and the problem with them is is that almost every one of them except the one I'm going to talk to you about here has some pretty critical negatives to it the worst which I think a lot of us start out with because they usually come in with a beginner's kit kit is the entrance feeder that's a a feeder that goes here has a jar here and the problem with that is is that first you're encouraging robbing because this is where the robbers are going to be and they're smelling that sugar syrup in there and of course that's gonna they're gonna have to somehow defend them you can't put an entrance reducer over it because they are you don't have to adjust your entrance reducer because is taking up part of your entrance here the other thing is is that you're going to have to be right there trying to take away the the empty jar and put Arion right in front of the guard bees so you're in at the smoke you're going to have to deal with the guard bees and you're going to encourage Robbie so I think the entrance feeder is is the worst idea of all the other kind of feeder that is pretty popular is the internal feeder where there's a frame or a black receptacle that goes into the one of the five frames slots and you feed it feed it by pouring it in well real bad problems there is because first off if you've got an interest I mean if you've got a a pool of of sugar water in your hive then bees are going to drown almost every one of those internal feeders has a be drowning issue the other thing is is every time you feed you have to smoke and open up the hive to get at the feeder to even check it to see if it needs to be fed or whether the and then you're going to have to deal with bees as they come out because they're there right there as you open it up to get to the feeder so it didn't like that so ended up trying the outside feeders where you take a big v bucket 5 gallon bucket drill holes in it and put it upside down and do the external outdoor feeding well the problem there is those five-gallon buckets full of sugar syrup are not only a big mess but you also have to carry those things out there and you have to dump them upside down which of course they're going to leak pretty heavily especially in the beginning till they get that suction going and you're feeding every bee in the community not only your bees but your neighbors bees and wild bees and Yellowjackets and pretty much anything that comes around is going to be looking for that sugar syrup that you're putting out so you can't really make sure that the bees that you're trying to feed are actually getting at that because all the other bees especially from the strong hives are muscling them out and I'm not I'm not confident that I'm getting what I want the out of the outside feeders so what I found to be the absolute best in fact I can't even imagine feeding otherwise is to do as a top feeder like this and you have a half gallon ball jar which is plenty of food and what you do is you put about half of it up with sugar this is in the spring feeding when you're doing one one half of it up a little better and then half the sugar put hot water in there too you dissolve it and be sure you put about a somewhere between two teaspoons or so of apple cider vinegar in there so you don't start that black that black mold growing into your sugar syrup if they're taking too long to to drain the jar that that vinegar that apple cider vinegar really stops your mold from growing and the best thing to like it so it's apple cider I'm sure they have been eating and drinking off rotten apples getting the sugar out of it for thousands of years but anyway so they don't seem to mind the vinegar and they'll save you a lot of problems with with nasty jars full of kind of mold okay then what you do is you have of course your your hive cover and you you get a piece of 8-inch Harbor cloth so that the bees can't get through it you put that on to onto your cover and then you take a half inch you need a half inch a piece of plywood with you drill a three inch hole you can get those three-inch hole saws at at Harbor Freight for just a few bucks and drill that and place that over here then you your ball jar you need to take the lid and pound it out to where this this typically gets recessed but you pound it out to what it's flat so that when you put your your ball jar on your feeder the bees can actually get at it I have found that the the half-inch is the perfect width for the joke for the lid and so the the little fit in there securely and you don't have to worry about it falling over and the wonderful Parvez is that you can actually monitor your hives this way you can look out across your bee yard you see everybody's everybody's jars if something if a jar is going down you know fairly rapidly you know you've got a strong hive if a if you see a jar that's just barely there barely eating in there you better check those B if something's are up you know they might not be doing so well a good strong hive will suck it down and in a few days and so that will help you kind of know how your bees are doing the other thing is you know and you're going to feed I mean you can look out there and say okay it's time to time to feed they're out so you you can sit there with your coffee in the in the morning and just look out over your bee yard and know whether whether you need to be making more sugar then when you get ready to to feed you don't even need a veil you definitely don't need a smoker because you're gonna come into the back of the hive you take this off the bees are all in there they've been used to getting that sugar you put your they aren't coming out because they can't and you're in the back of the hive so you are dealing with the entrance and the guard bees and you aren't encouraging robbing because you're inside the hive with the feed and they can't they can't drown because they're not a pool of sugar syrup in there for them to drown in and you don't have to take the top off so this is the only way to feed and then you just slip your slip your new syrup on there you're good that's the end of your problems with getting the feed so this this to me is is the only way to go as far as feeding bees okay now that's the top that's putting their hive together but then you're gonna place it now with the flow hive you're gonna have to have it to where it tilts tilts back to to be able to get the honey to flow backwards into the into your into your tubes there well if you tilt a typical hive back unless you've got a screen bottom board when it rains well then the water will run into the entrance and then set up in the hive and cause problems so most of times they tilt it forward to keep the rain from running in the entrance well of course that's the problem when you get ready to drain your flows so the easiest way to address this is what I found is if you take a 1/2 inch 1/2 inch PVC pipe put it right in the middle screw it down to a board and then and use that as your base and then you you take and take a block like this you put it in the back and that supports the the typical sort of scenario where you're just having bees come in the front and keep the rain out now when you get ready to drain your sit birth you just pull this block out you push on the back of the hive it rocks it back like that you put this under the front and then you you drain your drain your flow hive and then when you're through draining and you're through extracting or doing what you're doing they're taking out the honey then you pull this out put it back down like that and then you have and then you brace it again like that and you're good for the rest of the year hmm now how to drain the honey now the normal video it shows them putting a tube in here and having a jar here well that's that's just asking for trouble first off if it's just a jar well the bees will come around and they'll try to get in your jar and then you've got a real issue the other thing is if you're draining one frame at a time it takes a while they're draining a frame and that's that's a you know if you've got quite a few hives or several lives that actually that can be taken quite a while so what I've found and it works great cuz I just did it on several hives as I I get these tubes at Home Depot they're one inch ID interior so they fit over your tube that comes with your flow hive and there are one and a quarter inch OD the outside diameter and then get an easy awful Walmart for $1 a quarter and you drill seven seven one and a quarter inch holes in the lid here's how I did mine so you can see my holes in there and then now this is one thing you learn from experience is is that you do not want those tubes to be too deep because they get in the honey and you definitely don't want them coming out because then honey is everywhere so what I found to be very effective in this regard is to put a couple of zip ties and pull it tight with pair pliers so there's really hat locks on to that plastic too but a couple of zip ties on both the inside of the cover and the outside of the cover and that left the tube rotate and it also keeps the tube from coming out or going in too deep and I'd leave it about three or four inches in what I've found is that when you do drain a flow hive the flow super the deep flow super will if it's full will come about four to four and a half gallons of honey so it's perfect for a five gallon bucket then what you do is you take your your five gallon bucket you put it on the ground now this is one thing you have to do prior to prior to extracting is find out the distance from your typical well you know depending on how how you have supported your hive how far it is from your floo floo frame to your bucket because you want the bucket sitting on the ground this thing is gonna be heavy when you get through and then what you do let me stop it here and I'll start it again okay so you set up your bucket you could get this easy off cover these um food safe buckets at Walmart I think are the best deal they're less than three dollars for a five gallon bucket and like a dollar and a quarter for an easy off lid and then you you drill your your seven holes in there so that you have seven tubes coming up and then what you do is you you pull off pull off one of your covers and insert your two and I would suggest you put a jar on the top because you'd want to keep a hold of those covers and you're going to need to pull pull these two I use pliers because they're easy to get my better than my big fingers in there and then what you do is you just go on down you pull the cover you insert your your tube and you going down you get all seven tubes in there then you come along and then you just open open every one of those those frames then you go back to the house and get some tea because the bees can't get into the honey and this is gonna take a while to drain and so you're draining all seven at the same time you're not I'm telling you within 3045 minutes if it's hot summer so the beach so the honey's fairly didn't very viscous at that point it'll flow right on in there and you're going to be shocked because I noticed when I went to and then I come back and I take take this cover off I have a new one that's it doesn't have holes in it and then tip tubes and put that on there and boy when you pick that thing out that thing weighs 60 pounds and it's it feels like it's glued to the ground but all of the all of the honey is drained from your from your flow hive and you haven't had any problems you haven't had any any bees or leakage or any of that stuff that you see on other other videos where people are trying to deal with all of how to get the honey out of the flow frames then then of course all you do is just go back you've let it have time to drain and so and you just put your covers back in there and you're done you're done probably further confer of the year um then what you do of course is to you're through draining and so you're going to let the bees I would put the with the frames back to where they can get into those cells let the bees clean up all the honey that's kind of on the flow frame get that all cleaned up then what you do is that as you let them have time to clean the honey off the super is just take the super off because I you're going to want to feed in the spring so you don't need that super up there and just just you don't need to take it to a honey house you don't need to mess up your kitchen or anything just take those take those supers and put them on a pallet out there somewhere and let the bees bees clean them up and so now you're ready to store your supers the bees have cleaned them all up and you're through for the year I mean it's so much easier than all that extracting and uncapping and in a honey house full of bees and then robbing it's just the nightmare with all the bees mad and it's hot and you're killing bees right and left and they're stuck you can't get them out of your supers so they're coming into the honey house with you I mean is that's the biggest mess in the world I wouldn't be a beekeeper if I was still having to do that so that's that's the that's the process now one thing I would suggest is when you when you buy your flow frames is before you put them to the bees that you you buy some wax or if you've got some wax I had a bunch of cappings and stuff from old days and you get a jar get a thing like this put it in a pan with hot water or boiling water and usually one this size will sit down in a pan and get that wax all all melted and then you take a trim roller and you you Rolly to the frames with that hot wax I tried just the straight straight frames with no wax on them and the bees had a hard time I don't even know if those those frames actually ever the bees have ever used them but the ones that I roll the the wax on they went right to him and went right to work so you're going to I would say you're going to need to put beeswax on those on those frames initially to get the bees to to take to them okay let me stop it and see if there's anything else that comes to my mind one thing I would say is when you're you're putting making your your super available for your for your frames this piece down here this aluminum this is a piece of aluminum bar here you're going to definitely need that because they'll be coming out of the rabbit from the frames below if you if you open up and you don't have this bar the other thing is I found instead of having in the video that's online about how to make a super into a flow super they have you chopping out an area in the each side here to sink down this far however what I found if you get a sixteenth inch aluminum bar you don't even have to do that just get a real small flat screw and then you can just screw it here and there's not enough be space in a sixteenth of an inch to actually have to fool with trying to chisel it out and trying to get it flush if you want to that's fine but I didn't find it necessary and I didn't do them on my hives the other thing is is that you're going to need to save the plug that comes out of your out of your hole saw when you make your feeder and that way you make make a plug for those times where you aren't feeding and you don't want the rain coming in okay well I have to say that I think the flow hive is the greatest invention ever I would not be a beekeeper if I was back into the into the robbing extracting uncapping and then them two days of clean up all that sticky mess I just wouldn't do it but this where you just go out and you just end up with a bucket of honey that's already filtered now let me say this about that because I've got the way I did it I was a little concerned that even though the honey that flows into the bucket is going to be really clean of any bees or debris still when I get ready to put them in a jar I don't want to have to fish anything out of honey when I see it going into a jar so what I did is I I created kind of a filter here I got a a five gallon bucket and I cut off the bottom of it and because you wanted high it high enough to where it's going to be over your honey but low enough to where you can stick it down in and and then I put pet screen now regular window screen isn't going to be tough enough to be able to handle the pounds of honey that you're going to be pouring on top of this but Home Depot sells pet screen which is screened for your windows that pets can't even scratch through even your dog's the cats can't scratch through there and this stuff is extremely tough and I just pop riveted a pet screen over this as my filter then I had a piece of vinyl siding because what I want to do is to be able to take a a take a bucket you have poured poured honey in and I want to be able to to turn it upside down and let it just drain into through the screen into my my the bucket where I'm going to be drawing growing the honey out and of course you're going to have to have have a bucket with a gate on it so that you can in this so you'll be draining it into there to get your jars filled we have a honey gate on a five-gallon bucket to do to do that but this way while you're while you're filling jars the honey can be leaving this 5-gallon bucket here you'll pretty much get all your honey it'll go through the screen and be ready and the bottom one to put more honey into into your into your distribution bucket okay I think I've thought of most things that I wanted to tell you about we'll make a video on some a couple of other ideas that I've had this into work I have lots of ideas but not on loans seem to work so I want to share those ideas that actually solved a problem and just work did work in real life okay well thank you for watching hope this helped

Channel: psyched1231

Views: 54,301

Rating: 4.6998973 out of 5

Keywords: Flow Hive, beekeeping, Chinese, Auto-flow, Extracting, Australian, bee, Honey, frames, auto, flow, beehive, automatic, super, langstroth, hybrid, extraction, copy, comparison

Id: MtwftxbnOdY

Length: 27min 8sec (1628 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019