FlowHive?

[OhZark Biddies]

The advertised advantage of the flow hive is that you don’t have to disturb the bees to collect honey.

The thing is, you must still “disturb” the bees for a number of hive management tasks and chores the rest of the time.

so the “advantage” of collecting honey with these hives being as easy as cranking a handle is immediately negated by all the other times you must manage the hive... which is why most all experienced beekeepers see the Flowhive as a gimmick.

In North America the days of setting a honeybee hive out back and only visiting it to collect honey once a year ended around 1990ish... and even before then it was often not really that simple.

by contrast, the varoa mite only arrived in New Zealand in 2016ish... so the Flowhive did provide some advantage there at the time of its invention.

But in North America at least, largely due to a number of honeybee diseases and hive pests, beekeeping requires a much more hands on approach than it did a generation ago... and it is because of this that the flow hive is mostly only attractive to folks with no bee keeping experience.

There are a lot of expenses and challenges involved in keeping honeybees these days, so I would encourage anyone looking to get into it to start with traditional equipment and then if you are still interested in the Flowhive after a few years, by all means go for it.

 

[Kusanar]

The advertised advantage of the flow hive is that you don’t have to disturb the bees to collect honey.

The thing is, you must still “disturb” the bees for a number of hive management tasks and chores the rest of the time.

I wonder if you could design a horizontal hive with a queen excluder on one end to keep all brood near the door, then put flow frames on the other side. You could still harvest the honey with the flow frames but could just open the lid to do other maintenance on the other frames without having to unstack the hive and get the bees really riled up.

 

[OhZark Biddies]

I wonder if you could design a horizontal hive with a queen excluder on one end to keep all brood near the door, then put flow frames on the other side. You could still harvest the honey with the flow frames but could just open the lid to do other maintenance on the other frames without having to unstack the hive and get the bees really riled up.

Yep, horizontal hives are generally considered better for not “disturbing” the bees than vertical hive designs.

There is all kinds of info on the dedicated beekeeping sites where experienced beeks compare and contrast the various designs by keeping their bees side by side in different hive styles, including the flow hive... but for the most part it’s all a series of trade offs.

there is no perfect hive design, and there is no real new modern day “hack” that hasn’t been tried in the past... often a couple hundred years ago.

the main thing though, is that there is a lot to learn about bee keeping and if someone is looking for the hive design to help flatten the learning curve, they’re probably setting themselves up for failure, simply because the hive design is generally of little importance compared to learning the bee life cycle and various other parts of bee keeping