If you are a beekeeper then, of course, you have. Ad nauseam. One weekend last February you could not swing a LOLcat without hitting an enthusiastic article about the apparatus at left, part of a system to drain honey from a hive without opening it. The articles were mostly the same few news reports being repeated along with excited blog posts by non-beekeepers with many links to the marketing video. Beekeeper opinions seemed harder to find except for a few surprising testimonials on the company site. Perhaps, as we were, the beeks were getting emails from friends and family asking for an opinion.
Before we could finish researching and mulling for our readership the energetic Emily Scott scooped us with a detailed report including a link to the the patent and a poll of her readership. Other bee bloggers slowly and thoughtfully chimed in, such as Rusty at Honey Bee Suite or globe-trotting beekeeper Kris Fricke or this beekeeping vlogger or vlogging beekeeper whose work we shall be watching.
That left little for our inexperienced selves to add to the discussion and the furor seemed to die down. No doubt there will be more once the early adopters start using the devices but until then it is beekeeping as usual.
But then the flow hive was brought up during a question and answer session at the SEMBA conference in March. We ourselves were asked about it at the April meeting of Ann Arbor Backyard Beekeepers. A co-worker emailed us in early June. A friend asked our niece the week after. Someone asked our beekeeping host at a party near June’s end. A week ago a store-owner brought it up to us as we were chatting at the register. It appears with such regularity that we went looking fruitlessly for a widget to add to our layout that would show "Days since anyone mentioned that flow-hive".
So for the sake of our non-beekeeping readership who does not regularly read all the bee blogs we do, we should at least point to a few references, which we have just done two paragraphs ago, and perhaps organize our own bullet-pointed summary after all if only to show off the cute little animated gif on which we spent so much time. The longer we delay this post the less of its dwindling relevance it will have and we will have completely wasted our time on the rough drafts. So here we go, succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy for any of our readers who still may care:
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First of all, we give the inventors (in a warm, sunny part of varroa-free Australia) the benefit of doubt in believing their reported experiences. They are surely honest beekeepers but just as surely someone has committed marketing on their behalf.
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Honey flowing into an open jar (or onto a stack of pancakes as in the video) seems to be asking for a robbing frenzy in the beeyard although the inventors claim their bees take no notice. The patent mentions the more credible draining into sealed containers.
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Not all honey flows readily. Ivy and heather are notoriously difficult to harvest. Even more common clover or multifloral honey can be reluctant to flow in cooler temperatures.
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How can the beekeeper decide if the frame is ready for harvest? Peeking in the device’s window just shows the edge of the comb. Hefting the box to judge by weight is not quite opening the hive but neither is it leaving the bees undisturbed.
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It seems to be promoting the wrong-headed notion of a beehive as just a noisy honey jar with a tap like a beer keg. This is probably what provokes the most visceral negative reaction.
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It is, one must admit, mechanically clever. There, we have said something nice about it.
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The mechanism is expensive. If it catches on one would expect the price to drop but it is unlikely to become inexpensive. For a commercial beekeeper one per colony would be a significant investment.
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Plastic mechanisms are prone to wear and breaking. How long before an expensive replacement is needed?
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Bees have a well documented reluctance to use plastic foundation. How well will they take to these plastic cells? One could counter this pessimism by pointing out the success of some beeks at using entire polystyrene hives.
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For a high price it seems to merely make more convenient the least difficult part of beekeeping. Honey harvest can admittedly be messy and sticky but becomes less so with practice.
As keepers of non-conventional beehives it is hard to see how we could retrofit this device. And, as the skepticism in our comments indicates, we are neither inclined to try nor tempted to go Langstroth for the sake of using it. Perhaps this will sweep the world and revolutionize beekeeping as the marketing claims but at risk of being old sticks-in-the-mud we only foresee a brief wave of badly kept bees before the idea is abandoned.
And you kids should get off our lawn.
2015 July 30 at 17:07
Thanks for linking to my blog! I agree with your reasons for not buying it. If the price was a lot cheaper I’d probably try it out, but it’s a lot of money to waste if the bees put honey that refuses to flow in there.
Your animated gif is clever! How did you make it?
2015 July 31 at 13:14
Credit where due. You were first on the scene, so to speak..er..write. And we are fans of your blog. 8)
To make the animated gif we used https://imgflip.com/gifgenerator . As with most such websites one uploads a collection of still images, arranges them in sequence, clicks a button, and downloads the resulting gif.
The stills were tediously made in MS Paint. Not a very good tool but it is what we had. It all started with making an image of the empy hexagons. We copied that file several times and then in each copy shifted the right side up by a different amount. Then we made copies of all of these image files of empty comb and with a few extra lines area-filled the honey to the appropriate level in each.
Thanks for liking the result. It is perhaps the only value we have added to the discussion. 8)
2015 August 08 at 14:40
I’ve saved the gif generator link, thank you. Sounds like some painstaking work went into creating it.
2015 July 31 at 06:25
I couldn’t agree more.
2015 July 31 at 14:16
Right on the money!
2015 July 31 at 22:08
I am a lone pro-Flow voice. Maybe because I live in Aus? Maybe because I actually find harvesting honey one of the more difficult/time consuming/unpleasant jobs in beekeeping (I’ve got way too much honey in my hives as I type this but am waiting for weather, energy and motivation to get out and do something about it). And I ALWAYS harvest at a time I’m not doing anything else. If I could do all my normal bee stuff (checking for disease, requeening, managing pests…) just like I always do and then honey fell into my honey bucket without the need for me to harvest, extract and return the frames, I’d be a happy camper.
I don’t check whether my hives are ready for harvest by weight but the professional beekeepers I work with here do. They heft the back of a hive and then steal an entire super based on that alone. The Flow system would be no worse (and maybe better).
My only concern about the Flow system is that it would harvest a full super and I am picky, leave frames only partly capped alone and that’s not an option with Flow. Proffi beekeepers tell me I’m silly and that the overall harvest is okay even if some of the cells aren’t capped. I’ve always been sceptical. We’ll see if I’ve been silly or if the proffi’s are wrong after the first Flow harvests really get going. Will their honey ferment and explode jars around the globe? Time will tell.
Okay, the price is another (very big) concern. I have 24 hives so would never spend the money it would take to convert. But if I had 2 hives and no extractor, the cost of converting them to flow hives isn’t a lot more than buying an extractor. This is a system for small backyard beekeepers and will never work in the professional market. But there are a lot more backyard beekeepers than professionals so there’s certainly a market.
I would love a hive or 2 using the Flow system, I’m too cheap to try, but I hope in a few years the price will be something I can afford and the system will prove itself better than the doubters fear.
2015 August 02 at 18:18
Excellent post! Thanks for rounding up all these sources in a way that is both informative and amusing. When this creation first came out, well-meaning friends plastered it all over my Facebook page. I smiled and nodded. Thank you for providing me with something with which to respond!
2015 August 04 at 11:53
Thanks! You added value to the discussion for me by letting me know that it exists. And now to do some clickthroughs to see what I can find out about the effect on the wax cells, and how the bees respond to the effect on the wax cells.
Basically, the concept seems creepy to me. As if bees were moving parts of an automated system.
2015 August 04 at 13:13
Ah, and now I know! Thanks! The wax thing sounds more plausible than anything I was imagining. Though hymenopteran rejection of plastic base, which you cited,sounds pretty important.
2015 August 08 at 16:25
I like the title of your post as it made me smile wryly to read it. I’m sure Flow Hive is very nice for easier honey extraction in some locations, but having seen how the bees at our apiary prefer natural comb I don’t think I could bring myself to use plastic frames.
2016 April 11 at 02:46
Always amazed at how people will post quasi reviews of products they’ve never actually tried out. If you don’t want to shell out the money, find someone locally who will let you witness their flow hive in process, THEN put together a review based on actual use. There are so many hostile reviews out there and while this isn’t to the extreme that most are, I’ve yet to find a negative review from someone who has *actually* used it themselves.
2016 April 19 at 16:38
Consider when this post was written.
The FlowHive burst upon the world with the infamous pancake video and a marketing message that should, at best, have been about honey harvest made easier somehow morphed into beekeeping made trivially easy. And known beekeepers were beset on all sides with requests for an opinion or recommendation. So we did what research we could and pondered and came up with the laundry list of observations in the post.
Since then the hype has died down, the marketing has backed off, units are being delivered, and we are content to sit back and see how it plays out over the next decade.