26 August 2020

This is a "flow" beehive - updated

"It's the beekeepers dream, turn a tap right on your beehive and watch pure fresh honey flow right out of your Flow™ hive and into your Jar! No mess no fuss and the bees are hardly disturbed."
Very interesting.  

Reposted from 2015 to add this photo of an "indoor" beehive -


Via Reddit, where the snarky comments are headed by "break glass to cause emergency."

3 comments:

  1. Really wonder what a few generations of not making their own honeycomb will do.

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  2. We are hobbyist beekeepers, and as such we have watched this with interest. To Anonymous' comment, I will say that in this system, the bees do still make their own honeycomb. It is not much more of a headstart than the traditional Langstroth hive frames give.

    I just wonder at the flow rate coming out of the hive. Honey is thick, and does not flow well unless it is very warm. If you were to uncap a frame and turn it upside down, it would take a long, long, time for it to empty, if it ever did. Secondly, some of this in the video simply would not work. If you drained the honey into an open jar, the bees would find it within minutes, and simply put it right back into the hive (or drown trying to.) You'd have to drain it in such a way that the bees would not have access to the jar of honey.

    Still, we are intrigued. Not because it means less work for us per se, but because it seems to create so much less stress for the bees. You would still have to crack the hive open to check the queen and disease and such, but if this works, it's like a dream come true.

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  3. Found this comment under the youtube vid that provided some extra insight and results after someone asked "It's four years later; did this work? Anyone?"

    "Apparently it's been produced, but the result is mixed, there are some reports of some bee colonies not wanting to use the flow hives, but some others say it's working pretty well when it works. However some are concerned about the design of these.

    For one thing, the beeswax is for one another component you usually expect in beekeeping, and filters out impurities of the honey, whereas with the flow hives, you don't get any wax, the honey isn't getting naturally filtered and there are some concerns about the plastic even contaminating the honey through natural degradation.

    Also some experts feel like this encourages the wrong idea. Bee hives aren't natural barrels of honey that you should always drain, the bees store this honey for rough times, and having an easy way of accessing honey could encourage people to get all the honey they can get, which could cause the downfall of the hive later down the line as it starves to death. Many beekeepers see beekeeping as a hobby with a little bit of side product, whereas this product seems to reflect the opposite, which again, could trick people into getting into beekeeping with the wrong ideas, which again, could cause the downfall of their colonies.

    So overall, it's a product that works well, but could actually harm the beekeepers in the long run as it encourages greedy behavior and doesn't reflect the patience one has to have to properly care for a bee colony."

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