Does this beehive thing work?

[Celeste Cannon]

I want to buy this beehive invention, it seems really cool because it doesn't hurt the bees. Does anyone have one of these or know if it works?

https://sweethives.com/collections/frontpage/products/the-honey-flow-hive

 

[danischi24]

It's a very over simplified approach to keeping bees unfortunately & has lured goodness-knows how many people into it. There are two huge draw backs to this kind of set up & one positive.
First of all, one needs to understand the life cycle of the bee.
There is a queen bee & she and some sterile worker bees form the nucleus of the hive. She lays thousands of eggs which the workers care for. Most are laid in small cells & develop into more workers, but some are laid into special larger cells & then fed royal jelly & become queens & drones (kings). When they become adults, they leave the hive and take a good proportion of the workers with them to start a new hive. This creates a few problems for the bee keeper. Firstly, with workers constantly leaving the hive with new queens, the work force collecting pollen etc is very depleted & they will likely only be able to just make enough honey to keep themselves going. When the novice keeper takes honey, the bees starve. Also, the escaped young queens & their workers cause trouble by swarming, getting into peoples houses, barns etc & in places where there are native bees, they out compete them. African killer bees that kill so many people each year were escaped queens originally.

So depending on the season, the bee keeper needs to open up their hive every week to every month & check for these queen egg cells and remove them. Then there is just one queen & a large worker force that produces far more honey than they need, so the beekeeper can harvest it without starving the bees.

The second draw back is pests & disease.
Like every animal in the world, bees are subject to both. A good beekeeper will routinely check their hive for various pests & diseases that could harm their bees & take appropriate action. Not doing so will cause a lack of productivity & in many cases, death of the hive.

So this "new" bee hive does not eliminate the need to check your hive every 1-4 weeks in a bee suit, losing some bees each time etc. The genius marketers don't mention that however, so people are left thinking that they will just have honey on tap & not have to deal with their bees in any other way & are sadly disappointed when the find things not working out so smoothly.

There is a positive for the beekeeper who understands & is prepared to do all the above though. Extracting honey can be a pain & you often have to buy expensive equipment to get it out. This step is made easy by the design of the hive you've linked to.

Hope the above helps you in making an informed decision.

 

[Celeste Cannon]

Thank you for this!

 

[Rubysword]

Queens are not raised unless the previous queen is failing or has been crushed, and the only was a hive splits is if two whole sisters(share a father) hatch at the same time. Otherwise, the first queen to hatch will kill the rest.

 

[danischi24]

No, that is not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_bee_life_cycle