Flow Hive First Impressions - Why I Bought A Flow Hive

Don't knock it until you've tried it. Why have I gone and bought myself a Flow Hive? Hi, I'm Laurence Ederson, Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. If you've watched this channel before, you would have heard me say that numerous times, which is don't knock it until you've tried it. Really drives me mad when people do that. They give their own opinion on something they've not experienced. And you would have never heard me talk about Flow Hives in a derogatory sense because I've never used them. Dean Clark has very kindly provided me with a Flow Hive at a very, very cheap price, so thank you very much for that, Dean. I paid £350 for this used Flow Hive. However, it's got 6 brand new super frames in it, so I think it's a pretty good deal. So thank you for that, Dean. If it all goes wrong, this will be on eBay at the end of the year and I'll pass it on for the same price that I bought it for. I think I'm going to have quite a nice long relationship with this Flow Hive. In this video, I'm just going to talk to you about why I bought this Flow Hive. I'll give you a little bit of a look around it. I'll tell you about how I think it works because I am a Flow Hive amateur. I've never seen one as until last week. All I know is what I've seen on the internet. So what I'm going to do is over the next year or so, I'm going to do various videos on the Flow Hives. I'm going to give you a real honest review of what I think of the product, where I think it fits within beekeeping within the UK, and just give you a good overall feel as to whether I think it's a product that's good or a product that's bad. So you will have all seen the advertisement for Flow Hives. Flow Hive did a really good job of advertising on a lot of my videos as well. So if you've watched my videos, you've probably seen the adverts for Flow Hives, and they look good, don't they? I always have to say, whenever you look at the adverts, I kind of think, well, they do a very good job of painting this idyllic picture of putting a beehive in your garden, Filling it with bees, never going and doing any inspections because obviously you don't need to do inspections when you've got bees in your garden. At the end of the year, you go and turn a tap, you fill it up with honey, you put it on your toast, and then you do that again every single year because that is how easy beekeeping is. Now obviously that's very, very tongue-in-cheek, isn't it? But that is what the adverts pretty much show, and I think Flow does lead you down the road of beekeeping is very, very easy and there's not a huge amount that goes into it. And it's just a case of turning the tap and you get honey. Hopefully what I can do on this channel is smash some of those myths. And I don't want to smash it in a really derogatory sense because I don't know how my Flow Hive experience is going to go. Might be really, really good and I sell up all of my colonies and I just go over to Flow Hives. Highly doubt that's going to be the case. It might be really, really bad and I tell you, do not buy a Flow Hive at any cost. They are just not worth it. And it might be somewhere in the middle, but at the moment I just Genuinely don't know where we're going to sit on that. So I'm going to run this hive throughout the year. I've got it on a double brood configuration. It's a Langstroth hive, so it gives me an opportunity to work with Langstroth again, which I'm really, really excited about. I've got 2 brood boxes and I've got a single honey super with 6 new frames in it as well. So 6 genuine Flow Hive frames. I'll show you all of that in this video as well. I'm really excited though about how I'm going to manage this colony. And I'm really glad that Dean gave me 2 brood boxes, because if he hadn't given me 2 brood boxes, the first thing I would have done is gone and bought another brood box as well. Because I think when you're managing these Flow Hives, really good idea to start off with a double brood. Because the problem that people have, from what I've seen on the internet, from what I've seen on people posting on Facebook, is their bees swarm. They're not doing suitable inspections, they're not doing the inspections often enough, and they're restricting the amount of space that the bees have both in the brood box and in the super as well, which is leading to the colony swarming. I'm going to do my best to avoid that in a number of ways this year, and I'll keep those for future videos. But it's all around making sure that the bees have got enough space and you're doing regular inspections. But you might just be thinking, why have you gone and bought a Flow Hive? Somebody just messaged me 10 minutes ago while I was doing another video saying, you've gone and bought a Flow Hive, and on your previous video you told us to make sure that everything remains compatible. Great point really, isn't it? Because I've just gone against my own advice. But let me get this straight off here: this isn't going to replace my commercial beekeeping equipment. It's not going to replace my commercial extractor. It's not going to replace all of my national hives. It's not going to replace the ability to operate as a commercial bee farmer. Not about to sell all of my 100 colonies and go and buy 100 flow hives. It's prohibitively expensive to do flow hives on any sort of scale. To buy one of these new and it's rare to get them secondhand. So thank you again, Dean. You're talking in the region of maybe like £800 or £900. The reason it's so expensive, obviously you're paying for the technology there, but you're paying for the ability to not have to use an extractor. And that's the reason that it just couldn't be a commercial operation because you're paying that £700 or £800 each go you buy one of these hives, you're effectively paying for the extractor built in. So the reason that I'm doing this video is not to replace any of my colonies, not to replace my beehives or my extraction equipment, it's to give the people who watch this channel a view into what the Flow Hive can do for them and if they want to use it in their own environment as a replacement for honey extraction equipment. So if I wasn't a bee farmer and I was looking into beekeeping and I kind of thought, I want to keep one or two hives in the garden, I want a little bit of honey for my family, and I don't want to have to get to the point where I have honey extraction equipment bogging me down— because believe me, it does bog you down for 11 months of the year— is the Flow Hive a suitable option, an alternative to standard beehives? That's the question that I want to find out. And as always, I'll give you my honest review. Paid for this myself, so no one's paying me to do these videos, no collaboration with Flow Hive. I'm going to give you the honest, real look inside a Flow Hive for a whole season and tell you how good I think it is. Right, so let's have a look at the Flow Hive then. I'm going to start at the top, work my way all the way down, talk about the roof, the supers, the frames, the brood boxes, the floor, the inspection trays, and we're A top-to-bottom look of my new Flow Hive. Right, first thing we're going to look at is the roof. And Dean already said this to me, primed me for this one, saying he didn't like the roof. And I'm straight away thinking, you know what, I don't like the roof. Number of things I don't like about the roof, so it's not even just one thing. First one is that it's a gabled roof. Just not a fan of gabled roofs. Okay, they maybe look a little bit nicer, but I'm not in it for things to look nice. I want things to be functional. I want things to be practical. I want it to make my beekeeping work easier. And this is where you can see this divergence of what Flow are doing. They want it to appeal to people who want to have a nice looking beehive in their garden and not really do that much with it. I want functionality there. So depending on where your priorities sit for this, I don't like a gabled roof. Next thing I don't like about the roof as well, and the fact that it's gabled, is I don't like the way it's made out of wood. Really not keen. You don't see that very often, that a roof is made of wood like that. I'd much prefer if they'd have made that out of like a nice copper sheet. Nice piece of metal sheet, something like that. I think it would have looked nicer as well. It would have looked more premium, and it would have been way more resilient to the damp weather that you get in the UK. So first off, don't like the roof. Really don't like it. Gabled roof, not a massive fan. Not a fan of the material. Then the next thing I don't like about the roof, and I think the roof is going to actually have to go in the bin, or at least go into storage until I sell this again, is that there's no room to feed underneath it. So if I want to feed them and stick a decent amount of syrup in over winter. Am I going to do that? I can only use like a tiny little feeder. You look underneath it and there's like no space whatsoever. Like, it would have to be like a super, super thin shallow feeder, and I'm not a fan of thin shallow feeders. So I think the roof is very much style over substance. Not keen on the way it's built, very lightweight. Don't like the gabled roof, don't like the materials. Not starting off very, very well, is it? Oh, right. I'm going to leave that in. That's the 3rd time I've done that now. I was going to take the roof off and say, right, that's not a good start. I don't like the roof. I'm going to go around to the front and collect the piece that keeps on falling off every single time I take the roof off. So this piece here, I know, I understand the reason for it because you need to get in there. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. The locking mechanism for the frames, how you get the honey out. But you get this piece of wood, really thin piece of wood that just rests there. Really annoying. It rests there, it falls out every time. Dean, surely you spend your whole life picking up this piece of wood. It is so annoying. But anyway, this piece of wood goes in here, just sits there, and then obviously once you put that thing round, you turn that piece round there, it holds it in. But when I go and put the roof back on again, the roof doesn't sit flush. So I'm guessing you need to turn it like that and then the roof sits flush. So then when you need to take it off, you obviously need to do that first and then you can take your roof off. How annoying is that? Sorry, Dean, every single negative thing I find about this hive, I'm gonna blame it on you. You are totally culpable for everything that's wrong with this beehive. Right, next thing, we've got a crown board and not much to say about this crown board other than I'm gonna give this hive a really, really good clean. I'm going to make sure that there's no risk of any foulbrood whatsoever. I trust Dean. I've seen Dean's bees, seen them on pictures. I don't think he's got any foulbrood, but you cannot be too careful. You need to make sure you're not transferring disease anytime you use used hives. So crown board, and I'm thinking, well, hang on, we're in a Langstroth system here, so we should be top bee space. But on both sides of the crown board, I've got a space. So a little bit confusing. And then you look at the top of the Super and the top of the Super is flush. So you've effectively got a bottom B-space top to the Flow Super. Interesting. Wasn't expecting that. I was expecting everything to be top B-space because you're working with a Langstroth system, but it kind of jumps between the two. And I'm sure there's reasons for that, design reasons for that. Nothing wrong with it in my book either. Just a little bit of an observation. In terms of the crown board though, really nice big solid crown board, like chunky, nice, good quality wood. They've not skimped on the crown board like I think they've skimped a little bit on the roof. So let's get on to the business end then, the Flow Super. I've purposely got the Flow Super the wrong way around here, so this should be turned the other way around. So this is the back and this end here is the front. I'm doing it so you can see everything in the field of view on this camera. So as I said, first thing that I noticed was it's a bottom B-space design on the top of the Flow Supers. Not really sure why they've done that. Interesting though. And obviously the crown board fits in nicely with that as well. Right, I'm on to my next gripe of this video. I do genuinely apologize, Dean, this is going to be a really negative video. Hopefully it will prove me wrong for later on in the season. Next gripe is you need a bag of bits. So the Flow Hive, it's not all-encompassing, doesn't include everything in there. You need a bag of bits to make it work. You need spares, you need accessories, you need a key, locking key like that, to get the honey in, get the honey out. I just think for the money that you're paying for the Flow Hive A key like this. Like, why couldn't it kind of like, I don't know, go in there and have its own little storage caddy? Could have been designed in a little bit better. Same for all of the bag of bits that you need as well, like the stand pieces. They've integrated some of them into the Flow Hive, which I'll show you here in a bit. But I just think for the money that you're paying, I want like a super premium design that keeps all of these bits in so I don't have to carry a bag of bits around when I want to go and extract some honey. And I do think that some of the bits are quite cool. Like, it is a nice design. And I'm going to show you that now. So I do think it's nice, like you have this turning piece here and then this bit comes out. They're just going to lose that, totally going to lose that piece. Put that down. And here is your locking mechanism. So to get honey out, what you need to do is you take this piece out here, that gives you access to all of the frames. You then have to go hunting in your little magical bag of bits and you get out these 2 bits here, which is your shelf. You fit your shelf onto your Flow Hive like that. Then you take the piece that you got out that fits in nicely there. And like I said, I really like that design, the fact that the shelf is integrated and you can move stuff around. I do think that's cool. And then that just plops in here and that gives you a really good solid shelf. And there's a couple of different positions here, so there's screws, you can have that higher or lower depending on how big the jars you want. And then I'm glossing over all of this because I'm just assuming that most people know how a Flow Hive works. So the next thing you need to do is go back into your little bag of bits. Take out a little plastic tube, go back to your Flow Hive, take out another little piece of plastic, pop the tube in like that, put the plastic somewhere where you're not going to lose it, go up to the top of the Flow Hive frame up here, take out another piece of plastic, get your key, which again, I'd like to see that integrated somehow. I should have done this the other way around. I'm right-handed, so I'm not using my left hand. And then you turn that up. That will release all of the Flow Hive frames to release the honey. Comes out of this spout, goes into the jar. So I've glossed over a lot of that there. I'm going to show you this in action later on in the year. So if you're interested to see how I use the Flow Hive and to get a real honest view and interpretation of how good this hive is, definitely hit the subscribe button. You're going to see a lot of this Flow Hive next year. So as you can imagine, that is fiddly. So fiddly. So many little bits, so many bits to lose. And then even on top of that, you've got little windows and bits that can come out, little things that can break. So definitely my first impression is it's fiddly, way more fiddly than they make out on the adverts. It really is very, very fiddly indeed. However, you need to take into account here that what you're doing is you're doing your extraction and your bees at the same time. So of course it's going to be a little bit fiddly, really is. And as everybody knows, extracting honey is so, so fiddly. Like, it takes you ages, it's messy, your wife has a go at you because you're getting mess in the kitchen. So to keep all of this outside, to keep it away from your house, could actually be a really, really good thing. And this is why I wanted to review and take a look at this throughout a whole season, just to give you the impression, give you the understanding of the benefits that a Flow Hive can offer over your more conventional beehives and separate extraction equipment. Right, so that's a little bit of an overview of the super. I just wanted to pull a couple of these supers out as well because you see a lot of people bash Flow Hive, but honestly How cool is that? Like, it really is a feat of engineering. It's such a good idea. I really, really like it. I can't wait to see how it stands up to me messing around with it and losing the bits, but also just how easy it is to get the honey out, how much honey you can get out of it as well, and how often you need to get that honey out. We'll cover that on future videos though. So like I said, you will see lots of this Flow Hive. If I do too many Flow Hive videos, do definitely give me a shout. So this is what the Flow Super looks like for anyone who's not seen it. It's made up of lots of different slats, and as you can see, you've got your hexagon shape there, and then you've got the ability to slide these up against each other, which I'll show you in a second, which breaks that wax seal, and then it means that it's going to drain down to that central tapping point, which means that you can collect that honey. So I found that really interesting. I wasn't aware that it was segmented so much as it is there. Obviously, it's held together with these little wire straps. And then you've got your key at the front there that moves it up and down, breaks the seal, means that you can drain the honey out. There's no getting away from it, it is a cool design. It's very, very innovative, and I love stuff like that. So I'm not going to say bad stuff about it at all. I've not experienced it myself. I'll pick up on the little gripes that I have with the design, but for someone to go out, make a hive like this, get it to market, do the crowdfunding, and for people to use it, I've got such huge admiration for Flow, just for thinking outside the box, doing something different, and bringing beekeeping to the masses, even if I don't quite agree with their advertising strategy. Right, the rest of the hive I'm not going to go over in a huge amount of detail because it's very, very standard. As soon as you get below that Flow super there, you're just into a Langstroth hive, simple as that. So I've got 2 Langstroth boxes here. I've done a separate video comparing Langstroth and National. I really like the Langstroth format, Very, very easy, simple, nice format to work with. The big difference that I'm going to show you with my Flow Hive videos though is that the importance isn't up here, isn't in the Flow Super. The importance is downstairs in the brood box. And I think that's where Flow's advertising strategy goes a little bit off. Doesn't say to you you need to be doing your weekly inspections, doesn't give you the reality that your bees are likely to swarm if you don't do anything downstairs in the brood box. Doesn't give you the advice that going in a double brood configuration is going to slow down that swarming impulse until later on in the season. I'm going to give you the beekeeper's view of how to manage the Flow Hive, how to get the very best out of it. So I've talked for ages there. I've told you all the bits I don't like. I've told you the bits I do like. I'm not going to go into any more detail because it's starting to rain. I'll save it for once I get some bees into the Flow Hive. I'm going to run this all the way throughout the year that I've said numerous times already in this video. But you'll get to see if I like it, if I don't like it, who I think it's suitable for, and whether I think it's a suitable purchase to make in the UK. So I hope you enjoyed that video. Don't go thinking that I'm selling up all my hives and moving over to Flow. That's never going to happen. I can categorically say that now. But I do think there's a place for this on the beekeeping market. But I'm going to do a full year of testing, reviews, post them all on my YouTube channel. So thanks for watching. As always, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.