Flow Hive Review - Is The Flow Hive Still Worth Using?

Forget about the Flow Hive, I've got something way, way better. I have got the Paradise Smart Beehive system that has been kindly gifted to me by Modern Beekeeping. I have been waiting to do this video for years, finally got my hands on 2 smart beehives from Paradise Beekeeping, and in this video and in the subsequent videos over the rest of the year— definitely hit that subscribe button— I'm going to show you just how good the smart beehive is and why it's a real competitor to the Flow Hive. So I've got lots of experience with Flow Hives. I've run them now for about 3 years. I've run genuine Flow Hives, I've run fake Flow Hives, and now I'm having a look at the number one competitor to the Flow Hive system. The Smart Beehive works on a very similar principle, but there's a few added benefits and a few real nifty features that this beehive behind me has that the Flow Hive doesn't have. Let's jump straight in and take a look. I'm so, so excited for this season to see how these beehives do. So starting off from the bottom then, the number one change that you'll probably notice here is that we are not talking about wooden beehives. The Smart Beehive from Paradise Beekeeping is a poly hive built upon their really good poly system. It's made up of Langstroth frames, and this is a 9-frame variant of this system here. Now I've had to bodge the entrance a little bit today because I left the varroa mesh in my car and I trampled on it and it's not doing very well, so I'm going to repair that. But everything that you can see so far is basically standard Paradise kit, standard poly floor with a Varroa mesh, and then a standard 9-frame bee box from Paradise Honey. Nothing smart about it yet, but the real fun comes when you go up into the boxes above. Now I've put an F1 Buckfast nucleus colony from Black Mountain Honey in here. They have filled this box up already, so it's not gonna take us long at all to get to the point where they are starting to create honey in this beehive. So once you've got the floor and the brood box set up and you've got your bees in there, the next thing that comes along is the queen excluder that's got a really nifty function to it. As well. So there's an additional entrance at the front of the queen excluder, and then you've got these notches on the top which are designed to keep the honey extraction frames compressed together. There is a reason behind these notches here. Don't just think that it's fancy design made to look nice. There's a functional reason for them. As I said, queen excluder on the bottom there as well. Last thing you're going to want is your queen getting up into those really, really good quality plastic honey extraction supers. I want to call them Flow Supers, but you know, they're not called Flow Supers, but that is the competition here. So queen excluder on that side, and then those nifty little notches there on that side. Now make sure you get this the right way around. That there is the honey collection trough, and over on that side there, that is the additional entrance. So that wants to be facing the front, and that bit there wants to be facing the back. So just going to brush the bees off the entrance there, off the top, and I'm going to place that into position there. Now if you're wondering why that's painted in a really cool camouflage style, I'm a little bit proud of the painting, I have to say. It's the artist in me coming out. Maybe it looks like a 6-year-old's done it, I don't know. I'm quite happy with it. That's Valspar masonry paint. You can buy it in loads of different colors. Really, really good paint when it comes to painting polyhives. So then the next box is very, very heavy. It's remarkably heavy, but the beauty of this system is you never have to lift this box because you basically just extract it all in position. the same way that you do in the Flow Hive. 7 frames, I think some of the Flow Hives have 6 frames, but the Paradise Smart Beehive has 7 Flow frames, and I can already imagine just how much honey you're going to be able to collect in here. So very similar to the Flow Hive in terms of the design, but no metal wires on here at all, and the way that this works is that it's the compression that's applied both on top and at the sides and at the bottom that keeps everything together. If I was to pull this, it would come apart now, and you can see you've got like the difference in alignment in terms of the cells. So when you're putting it in, you need to make sure that all of those cells are open and not closed. So you can see I've got all of the cells there in the open fashion, which is the one that you want when the bees are collecting honey into it. And I'll just show you now what it looks like when you get them into the closed position. So the ways that you change those frames is that you use this little poking rod, metal poking rod, And you're just going to push it through the hole, and then that flips all of those plastic cells round the correct way for either storing honey or the correct way for extracting honey. You'll see here on this end here you've got a hole, you've got a hole on either end, and then this will just go in here. And then if I go through the top hole here, you'll see that I've changed the configuration there. So I'll just show you that again because it might be a little bit confusing. So this configuration that we've got here, this is the closed configuration, and you can see I've got the metal poking rod all the way through. There's 2 holes there. One hole turns it into the closed position, one hole turns it into the open position. So all it is is a push-fit operation. You don't need to turn anything like you would with the Flow Hive. You just need to make sure that you're using the correct hole. So you can see there that the poking rod is in one hole at the moment, and then I've got another hole on the other side. Side as well. So you can see at the moment everything's in the closed position. If I poke it now through, you'll see them all change over to the open position there. Similarly, if I come in from the other end, they're all open now. That's the honey storage position. If I want to close them and extract some honey, I come in from this end here and I just push them, and you can see them all change over now. Probably the most fun thing that I've done already today. That is absolutely beautiful. So as I said, 2 holes. That's the first hole there. That's the second hole there. And you just want to make sure that you're going into the right one in order to either keep the honey in the frames or to extract the honey. So I'm taking my super and I'm just placing that on the top there. And all I'm going to do is just go in. It's the bottom hole is to make sure that they're open. And I'm just pushing that in all the way, making sure that all the cells are going to be completely open in the honey So that's it, the Paradise Smart Beehive system is now set up. All that's left to do is to place the roof on. That part of the roof there should be facing the back, 'cause that is where you're gonna access to be able to extract the honey. That's the bit that goes on the front there. And that is it, it's completely set up now and ready to go. Works in exactly the same way as the Flow Hive does, in that the bees will go up, they'll store their honey upstairs in the supers, You can view it from the viewing windows when that honey is ripe and when that honey is ready to be extracted. All you're going to do is insert these little containers and these funnels into the back and you can extract all of the honey into a single container in one go. For me, that is by far and away the biggest benefit of using this system. I love the fact that it's poly. I really do love the fact that it's poly. But the one thing that really annoyed me on the Flow Hive was that in order to extract multiple frames at a time, I had to set up my own system or I had to do it one frame at a time, and it was just incredibly time-consuming. I didn't enjoy it, and I just wanted something that was a vast improvement and way quicker. This design here is so much better. This just sits in the bottom of that little crown board. This pipe goes down into your honey container. You put that rod in all of the holes, and you come back the next day and all of the honey is in a bucket and everything's sealed and there's no robbing. That is a massive, massive upgrade on the Flow Hive, and I'm genuinely excited to see how well this works. Now I'm not going to fast forward this video because it's probably going to take a good few weeks for the bees to get up there and to work those frames and to get honey in them, but I will do regular updates on this system throughout the season. So if you're interested in knowing more about the Paradise Smart Beehive System from Modern Beekeeping, definitely hit the subscribe button because this one is going to be so much fun.