A beekeeper compares a counterfeit Flow Hive to the real thing, finding the fake uses unknown plastic while the genuine hive is BPA-free. The colony is building comb and capping honey, but the bamboo queen excluder has wrong spacing and needs replacing with a standard plastic one.
In this video, I'm going to give you an update on my fake Flow Hive, tell you how well the bees are doing in it, and see if they've started to work the supers. So before you hate on this video, please give it a chance. This is available to buy in the UK, and what I want to do is I want to compare it to the original Flow Hive, as in a genuine article Flow Hive that I've got just over there. My initial findings are the genuine one is way, way better in terms of quality, functionality and accessories. This one here is lacking behind a little bit, but I wanted to do that comparison to give people an informed view of which one of these is better. And I will follow up with that video later on in the year, which gives you a real comparison— fake Flow Hive, real Flow Hive— which one is the best. Until that time, we're just going to have a look inside, see how the colony is getting on, see how close we are to extracting some honey. So as you can see, a lot more action upstairs than there was previously. Last time on here, we bruised all of the honey frames downstairs in the brood to try and get them upstairs, and now you can see we've got plenty of bees working up in these supers. If you take a look down all the cracks there, you can see the bees working away. I'll pull out a couple of those central frames and just see if there's any honey in them yet. So we're a little bit further behind the genuine Flow Hive, and the bees are only just starting to put it in and actually cap it over. But you can see they're really nice capped honey. The bees continue to bring in nectar, and because we've got them used to working up in these frames, they're really used to it now, and they're continuing to bring that honey in. I have to say, I'm so excited with these Flow Hives. Genuine or fake, they really are loads of fun. But the one thing that concerns me with this one here is what is this plastic made of? Now I know and I trust that the Flow Hive is genuine BPA-free plastic, and yep, it comes at a premium, but it comes safe in the knowledge that you're getting the correct grade of plastic. What I love about Flow Hives is that you're getting the honey straight from the hive and you're getting it as a real health product. If you're looking at getting honey from your hives for health reasons, And you don't want to heat it and you want it to be the R word, then you don't want to be putting it in dubious plastic of unknown origin. That's one area where the genuine Flow Hive really does outcompete this one here. And just as a little side view here, you can see lots of wasp activity now. The wasps are well and truly on with all of this, and we need to make sure that the bees can control it by having nice big strong colonies.
At this point in the video, my audio completely died, but all I was talking about was how incredibly rubbish this bamboo wooden queen excluder is. I don't think the queen spacing is correct. There's loads of brace comb, loads of wild comb. I don't think the bee space is correct either on the Flow frames or underneath that bamboo queen excluder. I'm gonna have to take it off, clean all of that off, but I'm definitely replacing it with a standard 10 Langstroth frame plastic queen excluder. Definitely one of the disadvantages of this fake Flow Hive is the really bad queen excluder. Same thing's happening down in the brood box here. The spacing is off, so I'm ending up with all of this wild comb all over the place. Don't know if it's because I've got a single brood space or a double brood space. Something's not right. Hopefully it will be resolved by adding in that plastic queen excluder, but I'll get my hive tool on this next time, smoke all of the bees down, chisel off all of that wild comb, all of the brace comb, and hopefully we can fix it. One good thing to say here though is unlike the genuine Flow Hive, that's an 8-frame with a gap, this one here is a 10-frame, but it actually has the correct spacing inside, so there's no wild comb down the frames. The brood in this colony looks really, really nice. Very healthy brood. Counted about 8 frames of brood in this colony. Lots of honey stored down there as well, around the rim. Nice amounts of pollen. I'm confident when we come back in about 3 or 4 weeks' time on this colony, the brood box is going to be full and all of that honey will be stored up in the Flow Super, and we can go ahead and do our Flow Hive extraction. I'll give you another update on this colony in about 3 or 4 weeks' time, and hopefully that Flow Super is full.
