🐝 Flow Hive Honey Harvest - A Simple Step By Step Guide

As promised, I'm back here with my Flow Hive and I'm doing a Flow Hive super extraction version 2. So I said when I did the first video that I know there was a lot of failures in it and I wanted to do those videos and show you those failures because it'd be really easy for other people to kind of trip up on those. That's what it shows you to do in the marketing material. Put your little step up, turn the tap on, put a jar underneath and everything is good. You've got a nice jar of honey. Doesn't show you the absolute chaos and pandemonium that it causes. By putting that scent of honey into the air and getting lots of robbing bees trying to get onto that honey. So I said I'll do this video again. And don't get me wrong, I'm saying this on all of the videos. This is not about bashing Flow Hive. I think today this is going to be the best Flow Hive extraction you've ever seen, and I'm going to walk away absolutely loving it. But I just wanted to do that kind of iterative cycle to show you how it would have started off, maybe show some improvements, and then get to a point where I'm really, really happy with my Flow Hive. So as you may have guessed, this is the first thing that I've got here. Thank you to Dean who gave me the dimension for this flexible food-grade plastic pipe. It's 33mm by 27mm. Make sure you get the internal and the external diameter correct. I'll stick a link up to the one that I got really, really cheap. And then the Flow Hive connection tube goes directly into this tube here, and then all I've done is I've drilled a hole into a jar lid And then I just poked the tube through. Works really well, and as you can see, if I take the lid off there, shake that around, that lid's not going anywhere. Literally not going anywhere. And all I'm going to do is I'm just going to use that. That's going to remain in situ in the Flow Hive the whole way through. And then for some reason, all of my lids fit all of my jars. If you want to know what was originally in these jars— pickled gherkins, jalapeño peppers, and pickled turnips. Yes, I know I'm a food freak. But amazingly, all of the lids fit really well, so it's completely interchangeable and it's just going to sit there and I'm going to fill up all of these jars. So that was the first thing that I learned, which was the actual getting the honey through the tube into the jar was very, very difficult, messy, and caused a lot of trouble with the bees. So hopefully I've solved it with this little solution here. And then the next thing was, well, I don't want to do it in the middle of a sunny day when there's lots of bees flying. So I'm doing it on my phone today, filming on my phone. It's rainy, it's cold, it's windy. I know all the supers in there now are completely chock-full of honey, capped over, ready for extraction. I've got no bees flying. I've got a container that's not going to get lots of mess everywhere. At least I hope it's going to work. Maybe this is going to be the perfect Flow Hive honey extraction video. Let's stop talking though. Let's get in, take a look how the bees are getting on. Not doing a bee suit because I'm not going in. All we're doing today is extracting some honey. So just a quick close-up of that. That's the Flow Hive tube, goes into my 27 by 33 diameter pipe, food-grade plastic, and then that goes down into this lid here, and I've just cut that lid out to make it fit nicely. All of the jars are the same, really nice cheap jars here, but they do fit really well. Let's get into the Flow Hive, see how much honey we can get. Right, so we've opened up both the faces, locking mechanism at the top there. A few rogue bees knocking around, and then we're going to extract a couple of these Flow Hive supers. Again, they've not come right up to the edge, but as of last week, I know that all of these were pretty much full, definitely all capped over. And then since then, we've had just the most amazing flow. So I know we're going to be in a really good position to start tapping some honey today. Right, so first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to try and get this tube in with my connection hose into there before I turn the key without making any mess at all. Show you how I do it now. Well, that works a lot better. Not a single drop of honey came out. I'm going to put that down to the fact that it's just considerably cooler today, so you've not got all of the runny honey sitting at the bottom of that pipe. Bees have cleaned it up. The humidity in the hive is going to be a lot lower, so the honey is going to be a lot less viscous. First job done. Come in here when it's raining, no bees flying around, and I've managed to connect the hose up without any spills. Right, next thing to do, I'm going to unlock those frames, see how much honey comes And there we go, the honey is coming through already. Always really worrying when you open it up and nothing comes through. And as I've got the feedback from people as well, I've got to know that the honey is kept at a really warm temperature in that hive, so it comes out looking a lot less viscous than it will once it's finally set. Already got a wasp checking out what's going on here. I knew this was going to attract the bees, definitely didn't think about wasps, so hopefully we won't get too many wasps around here. I'm not sure if you can see that, but there's a wasp in there. But already this is working so much better than before. No mess, no spills, my honey's filling up nicely, and all I need to work out now is how I'm going to do that really quick changeover. I reckon I've got this in hand though. So I'm getting my jars ready, that's coming out really quickly. I'm gonna get my next one. This was pickled peppers, love pickled peppers. I'm just gonna get that ready for when the honey starts overflowing on the next Gonna be a little bit difficult. Hopefully I can do it so there's not too much mess. So all I've done there, I had the tube going down too far into the honey. I don't want the bottom of the tube to get covered in honey because when I take the lid off, it's all gonna go everywhere like that. So I'm just trying to get that right up to the top. You can see here there's a little bit of balancing that needs to be done. Would this work directly on the shelf? Probably not. I need to get like a 90-degree elbow. We can do version 3, version 3 of failure. Slow hive extraction is not a problem. We'll do plenty of these videos, but I just wanna make sure that this version here works well and I don't get it spilled everywhere. So we're nearly up to the top there. All I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna loosen that and I'm just gonna try and fill it manually like that. You can see the honey coming out still. What I don't wanna do, I don't wanna get honey everywhere, which is what I did last time. I wanna keep it all in the jar, but I don't want bees to go in the jar. So I'm gonna do this changeover really, really quickly. And I'm not gonna be silly with it and try and absolutely rim each and every jar. This one here is perfect position, so all I'm gonna do, best if you've got 2 people to do this, but all I'm gonna do is just try and quickly switch that over like that. So there we go, that worked really, really well. As I said, all of the lids are interchangeable. So that is one jar of honey complete now. No bees in it, couple of bee legs in it, no honey's come out from any of the tubes. Now I can fix this one back up before this wasp gets inside. So there we go, now we just play the waiting game. I have no idea how much honey you'll get per frame. Normally, kind of in a national deep hive, you might get maybe 4 pounds per frame, something like that, maybe a little bit less. That there is definitely maybe a pound and a half, couple of pounds of honey. Quite big jars, these ones. So I'll leave this to run for a little bit, see if we can get this next jar full, and then we'll go on and we'll do some more frames as well. I want lots and lots of honey from my Flow Hive. I know they're struggling for space in there, so I want to make sure that they've got sufficient space to store all of the nectar that's coming in, and I'm doing that by draining down all of the frames. Right, it looks like that frame there is empty. I've got one big full jar and maybe like an 8th of another jar. I've switched the hoses over now, so I'm going to turn on the second Flow Hive frame. Hopefully we get a little bit more honey out of this one. Always surprised with like the amount of resistance that you actually need to open these frames up. Like, it's not Like turning a little key. You have to really put some welly into it, and I'm always a bit concerned that I'm going to snap it. Like, it's plastic, could just be snapped. Not snapped one yet, so I'm not overly concerned that I'm doing it wrong, but I just need to make sure that I can turn that key all the way around 90° to actually get it unlocked. Right, that is unlocked now. Let's see if we get any honey coming out of this one. So definitely my favorite bit in all of this is turning the key and then waiting. And you kind of think, oh, I've done it wrong, oh, there's no honey in there, and then all of a sudden it starts to drop down and all of a sudden it starts to come in. And as I'm saying that, I'm doubting myself, I'm thinking, nope, there's not going to be any honey in this one, and there it comes. It starts coming out very slow and then it starts to build a little bit of momentum. Love the honey in here, really nice, good, flavourful lime honey, beautifully light, beautifully clear. And what I really like is tasting the different flavours from the different frames. I know I've crossed over that jar there and I've got quite big jars, but I'm going to do hopefully 5 or 6 different jars and then I'll take a look at the colours of each of them at the end. Right, so we're back to waiting. This is amazing, isn't it? No bee suit. I know it's a little bit drizzly, a little bit windy, but it's so much fun not having to be in a bee suit. And yeah, okay, we've got some wasps knocking around, Don't like wasps, but they're going to obviously be attracted to that honey no matter how small. You get a smidgen of honey anywhere, open up some frames, the wasps are going to be all over it at this time of the year. Maybe we can be quick, do this extraction pretty quickly. You could rig up 6 of these if you wanted and do it all at once, but I don't want to get messy, I don't want to make the mistakes, and I want to check out each of these different hives, each of the different flow frames individually. So there's my honey coming through now, really good flow. You can see where they got the name from. And again, look at this, no bees, no legs, no wasps, all in the jar, completely sealed up. Even if there were bees flying around, they can't actually get in the jar here. So don't think that this is working only because there's no bees flying. The bees literally cannot get in there. So as long as I do my changeovers really quickly, shouldn't be any issues whatsoever. Right, what jar have we got next? This one, we've got Mrs. Ellsworth's Pickled cucumbers. Could it be any more English than that? Love these gherkins. So again, I'm just going to loosen that lid, try and get it to a point where I can do a really quick changeover. Don't want to spill any honey here, and I don't want to get any honey messed up on there either. It's just going to attract more bees and wasps. So you can see there, if I open it up, all coming out the bottom of the tube. Really good flow on this one. You can see the pipe up there is completely full. I reckon on this one we're probably going to get a couple of jars full. But look at the color of that honey. It is absolutely beautiful. So I'm just priming myself for this swap over. Got a wasp coming in there. Look, it's already sensed it. It only takes that tiny amount of time for the flying insects, the bees and the wasps, to try and get in there because they know that is a pot of gold. So I'm going to quickly try and get this changeover done, get that wasp away, try not to make any mess. And there we go. I've just broken something. Ah! Hey, this is working pretty good. I didn't even get drips on the side there. That one there's my second jar, similar color to the first one, and I've done the changeover. No leaking up there, no leaking down here, completely sealed over. This is working really, really well. So it's very, very hypnotic watching honey drizzling like that, especially when you know that is straight from the hive. I'm not going to use the R word, but it definitely is the R word. No heating, no tampering, no adulteration. This is straight from the hive, as good as it possibly gets. Not filtered. You're going to get your pollen grains in there, all of your good enzymes. This really is a health food at its very best. So no signs of it slowing down up there. That tube is completely full. This is definitely the best frame we've had so far. I'm going to do all the frames today, so we'll go through every single one because I really want to see how much I can get out of this. And as I said before, I want to make sure they've got sufficient space in order to go away and fill those Flow Hives up again. So this is just like so nice and calm and fun. I'm just sitting here and it's so chilled. Like, it's cloudy, it's cold, it's drizzly, really not got many bees flying at all. What a perfect day to do Flow Hive super extractions. You see it on the adverts, don't you? It's in Australia, everything's sunny, so you kind of think, yeah, well, I want to do it on a sunny day. because I want the honey to actually flow out of the hives. No problem whatsoever. It is 16 degrees here today, absolutely freezing. Why am I wearing shorts? I'm crazy, but it is very, very cold. The heat wave has ended, perfect time to extract your Flow Hive supers. It's still going strong at the top, and then it's going to fill up another jar as well. So this one here is Mellis pickled peppers, really nice with a kebab. Quite a nice looking jar as well with the kind of shape that goes up. I'm going to get this one ready now for another hopefully clean transfer. A bit concerned about running out of jars today. Those 2 down there are a little bit underfilled. This one here, I'll see how high I can take it, but already I've got a bee and a wasp coming over, so I really want to get through all of these without any bees or wasps in the jars. So I'm going to lift it up there. You can see slows down the flow, and then I'll transfer it over to the new one. Like, not even so much as a drip Down the sides. I'll show you just the single little tiny drip that you get using that method. So there you go, hopefully you can see that, that tiny drip on the rim there. That is it, nothing down the side. Really easy method of transferring it over. I'm very, very happy with this. Now, I definitely didn't invent this. Don't want anyone thinking, you know, I invented this, this is my design. I completely copied this off someone else. Somebody else did this, and I think it's a great, great invention. I'm very, very surprised that Flow Hive haven't patented it and sell it for like £200 or something as a drip-free honey jarring extraordinaire mechanism or something like that. Don't do it with that. Get a pound gherkin jar, eat the gherkins, and then just fill it up like this. Now while that one is filling up there, and you can see it's just slowing down a little bit now, I'm gonna have a little taste. So this is all for my own use. Do not worry, I'm not selling this honey. So I can stick my finger in it. Let's have a little taste. That's so nice. Very, very different to the one I had before. Last episode I did this, it was guaranteed lime honey, like really, really light, much lighter than this. Green hue, little bit of a minty taste. I love lime honey, but this one here, you can still taste the lime, but there's a real mix of something else in there. Probably a good proportion of clover. Oh yeah, but you're still getting that really good lime undertone. I love honey like this. Local Welsh wildflower honey with a mix of everything really, really tastes good. My wife is going to be so, so happy that I'm coming home and bringing lots and lots of honey. I'm going to give some to the landowner here as well because they love some really nice local honey, and there's nothing better than when it just comes out straight away from the hive like this. And as I said before, you know me, like, I've got a big, very, very expensive honey extraction room. I've got all of the kit. But you know what, something as simple as this, it's so good. Like, I do not understand why Flow Hives in the UK and across the world get such a bad rap. I appreciate there are some issues with it. It's got a rubbish roof, it's got a gap in the brood box, you have issues with swarm management But you know what? Put a dummy board in, get a new roof, build a new roof, and have multiple brood boxes. Fixes all of those problems. And I bet you any money a lot of the people that are saying, oh, Flow Hives are rubbish— ah, you little shit! And there we go, another sting to the face. I hate getting stung in the beard. You can never get the sting out. But anyway, it's brightening up here and it's not getting as windy anymore, and the bees are becoming more active. So maybe I'll stop flailing my arms around like this. I'm pretty sure one's stinging me on the back of the head. Yep. Okay, you've gone as well. Right, we're going to close this up, but I'll finish off what I'm saying in that a number of the people who are probably slagging off the Flow Hives and saying, oh, Flow Hives don't work in the UK, you can't do them with all seed rape, you can't manage swarms in them, all of these negatives, bet you they haven't tried using a Flow Hive. And when I was kind of researching this over the years, So many people were saying, nope, definitely doesn't work, absolutely rubbish, do not buy them. But as always with this channel, I want to see it for myself. I don't want to go on secondhand information from people who haven't actually even tried it. I want to work it out for myself. And I'm so impressed, like really, really impressed with how functional it is, how easy it is. And as I said on previous videos, and I hope no one's getting bored of me saying this, But you know, if I wanted to have like 2 or 3 hives in the back of the garden and I knew that was it, 2 or 3 hives, even 1 hive, something simple in the back of the garden, and I just want to turn a tap and get some honey, can't really beat a Flow Hive. Like, for the cost of 1 single hive, it's just not that much money when you take into account that you don't need all the honey extraction equipment as well. Right, so I'll let this run on a little bit more, probably going to get to about half a jar on that one, and then we'll go into a different frame. And we'll start filling that one up as well. Right, we're going to go for another changeover then. If you're wondering what this jar was used for, it's pickled turnips in beetroot juice. I know, pretty odd. Let's do the changeover, see if we can do it again with no mess, either this side or this side. Right, it's become apparent that the bees have become pretty active now, so I really do need to requeen this colony here. It's definitely not an F1 Buckfast, and it's definitely a very, very angry colony, so that's unacceptable behavior for me. Sitting at the back of the colony not doing anything, and they've just pinged me like 3 times. So this queen is definitely going to get done. So we'll quickly fast forward to the end of the video and I'll show you how much honey I've gathered today from 4 Flow frames. Right, scrap that. I'll persevere a little bit more. Couple of stings to the face and another one going for me there. Really important note here, when you're closing them back up, don't forget to put the Flow Hive frame back into the locked position. Otherwise, they're not going to be able to store honey in it. And when you come to turn that key again, you're not going to get anything. I missed out on that one there. I'm just going back through, making sure they're all in a closed position. So let's move on to the 3rd frame, see if we can get some more honey. Right, so one of the disadvantages, and you could definitely say this is a disadvantage, is that it takes quite long to do the extraction. But if your bees aren't as angry as my bees in here, I reckon you could do this kind of like on a nice day, do it in the evening, take your time, get some friends around, taste the honeys as you go. Make a real event of it. But also, if you wanted to do it quickly, you could just build 6 of these and just do all 6 at once, and that would really, really speed it up. Probably do the whole thing in like 20, 30 minutes. Right, disaster has struck and another bee is coming for me. This is no-nonsense beekeeping and I always show you my mistakes. So this needs a little bit of a rethink. Definitely gonna have to do a version 3 of this because the flex in that hose, it really is quite difficult to get the hose in and out and do the manipulations. Whilst guaranteeing that the hose is always connected into the flow super. What happened there is I was trying to do the manipulation and I did a really small movement down here and the whole original hard plastic hose, the flow hose, came out. I've got honey all down the front of that hive now. Really, really annoying because I'm on my 5th jar and I'd not spilled a single drop of honey, but now I'm really stuck. And I've got honey everywhere, and it's going to be not long before there are bees all over this. So I'm going to do my best to clean it up. I'll show you just how bad the mess is now though. So the saving grace is it is the most delicious honey I think I've ever tasted. Really nice lime honey. But as you can see, that hose, it came out, it's dripped all the way down my really well-painted brood box there. You can see it dripping at the bottom. Going to have lots Lots and lots of bees all around this hive, so I need to make sure that it's completely sealed up. It's definitely going to attract wasps, it's definitely going to attract bees. If this happens, lots of warm water, just wipe it down, keep on rinsing it. Don't need any soap or anything in there, you just want to get every last drop off, else you will have a huge amount of bees trying to clear this up, and obviously it's then a disease risk. I'm so gutted with that, it was going so, so well. But the tension and the kind of flex in that hose really isn't the best at all. I'm going to rejig it and I'm going to try and get myself some sort of 90-degree angle to get the hose to come out like that with a fall on it so the honey still flows, and then for it to go down directly down so I'm not using a flexi hose like this. Dean, if you're watching— I know you're watching— what do you think? If you come up with a better way of doing it, let me know. I'll do it on the next version of the video. Gutted as well. Got it all down the side of this jar when I was trying to fix the leak up there. It's all gone down the jar. I have to lick it all off now with my hands. Difficult work, but someone definitely has to do it. These bees are all over me now because the smell of honey's in the air. You'll get some bees flying, that attracts other bees from this hive, from other hives. I'm going to finish off this jar, I'll do one more, and then I think we're done. So I'll leave it filming and I'll show you, kind of try and show you exactly what happened the previous time. Obviously, I'm not going to do it again. I'm going to try and not do it again, but if it happens again on camera, I will show you it and I'll give you a close-up. So, so as we were getting towards the top like that, I took the hose out. What I should have done is like pushed it in. Oh, it's gone out again. Right, this is not good. Right, so this is very difficult to do. So the problem is that the hose is ever so slightly oversized and only like a couple. Couple of millimeters, but it needs some sort of grip to stop the plastic flexible hose going over the plastic hard hose. That's what's caused the problem here, and without kind of taking it all apart and starting again, it's gonna be very, very difficult to fix. So I'm just going to drain this one here. We will come back with the next iteration. I'll see how much I get out of all of these ones here though. But that was a much better transfer there. Lids all fit, really happy with that. 5 jars. I reckon they're about a pound and a half, those jars. So at the moment we're talking 7.5 pounds. It's not a massive yield, but there's lots and lots of honey. Like, that will take me weeks if not months to get through at home. And bugger, I got a wasp already. All right, in the jar like that. Okay, let's rejig it. And how interesting was that? It just goes to show, within seconds of me not putting that lid back on, there was a wasp in the jar. Luckily it just decided to go out. If you go back to the previous videos, you'll see there were so many bees in the jar. And as soon as you get a few bees in the jar, then you end up with loads of bees in the jar. Same thing works with wasps. If you get a few wasps flying around the jar, other wasps come along and they see the activity and they know something's good, so they try and get in as well. So you can see the wasps are already on it, a couple flying around at the top as well, but they will clean every last drop of that off. I'm gonna have to wipe it down. I've got to go away and get cloth though to start doing that, so I'll have to do that in a few minutes' time. Really interesting to see. So that Flow Super there, that's not been tapped, and I've got a very minimal amount in there. This one here and this one here, they've both been tapped today, and as you can see, they look to be full at the bottom again. And that's to be expected because you've got all the runoff. Even though I've closed and locked the frames, you've got all those drips gathering down at the bottom. I'm not going to try and take that off, but it'd be interesting to see when I come and do version 3 of this whether the bees have taken that honey and moved it back upstairs into the cells. I reckon they probably will have done, but I'd like to kind of be in there at the moment and see what's going on downstairs in the brood box, see how much honey's falling down into that tray there. Might just quickly pull the tray out and have a look, see if we can see any honey in it. And yeah, you can see like a little bit of remnants of honey. Definitely needs a good clear out, that tray, doesn't it? But it's not quite as bad as I thought. Like, some people were saying it was going to be completely drenched. I know it will drip kind of from up there internally down over the brood nest, but the amount that's actually reached the bottom there doesn't seem too significant. So next video, I'll get in there, I'll clean all of that out, and maybe we can see exactly how much honey does fall down. Right, so we're all done. Nearly got to the end there without leaking honey everywhere. 6 big pound-and-a-half jars of honey, really, really nice. I'll give you a quick close-up of them now. So here's my 6 jars. You can see a little bit of variation in between them, but not a huge amount. A couple that are definitely a little bit lighter indicates to me that they're more than likely going to be lime honey from what I know we get in this apiary here. But lots and lots of honey. Like, I've already had 3 of these jars from this colony here This was a really late starter as well. Next year I know I'm going to get a bumper, bumper crop out of this. I'm going to get a spring crop, I'm going to get a summer crop, and I'm really, really happy with how this is working. So there you go, that's version 2 of how to extract honey from a Flow Hive super. Definitely better than the last version, definitely still not a perfect way to do it. I will come up with a better way though. Stay tuned for version 3, and don't listen to everything you hear on the internet.