In this vlog, beekeeper Laurence Edwards inspects a wooden 10‑frame Langstroth hive fitted with a non‑genuine “fake” Flow Hive super. He discovers the super is jam‑packed with honey, the colony has produced unusually massive clumps of propolis, and there are dozens of capped swarm cells and emerging virgin queens, indicating an imminent or ongoing swarm. Unable to locate the original queen, Laurence removes most queen cells, redistributes emerging virgins to three queen‑less nucs, and leaves a single ripe cell for the colony to requeen itself. He discusses the space constraints of single‑box Flow setups, the difficulty of managing swarms in such systems, and the uncertainty surrounding food‑grade safety of the plastic supers compared to certified Flow Hive products. The video combines on‑site inspection footage, measurements of propolis mass, and practical beekeeping advice, concluding that while the fake Flow Hive performs well in honey collection, it brings significant management challenges.
Chapters
The fake Flow Hive. Oh my God, the fake Flow Hive. The colony is trying to swarm. We've got lots of honey upstairs in the fake Flow Super. Also, I've got a mysteriously large amount of random propolis. I'm talking tennis ball-sized clumps of propolis. I've got emerging virgins in this colony today, and I can't find the queen. Right, so let's start at the very beginning. Came into this colony today to kind of see if they'd even started working upstairs in the fake Flow Super. I lifted off the Fake Flow Super and oh my goodness, it is full. Absolutely jam-packed full of honey. We're gonna take a look at that in a little bit. Then I looked inside this colony and pulled out the first frame and I was like, what is that? There's something very, very odd going on with this colony. Nothing sinister, but huge, absolutely huge clumps of propolis on the bottom of the frames. Just looking around for my hive tool there. Let me get a bit of this propolis off and you can see what I mean. Like it's pure, pure propolis, absolutely nothing else in it. I've never seen bees produce so much propolis just in big clumps like that. So lots of propolis. Why do I think they're doing that? I think they're not liking the entrance. Didn't put a mouse guard on this colony here. Big, long, wide entrance, and they seem to have propolised big lumps of propolis like that at the front of the bottom of each frame. Seems to me like there was a bit of a draft, they didn't like it, so they propolised it all together. I'm going to take every single piece of propolis off and I'm going to put it up there and I'm going to form it into a ball and I'm going to see how much it weighs. So then going through the colony here, I was thinking, right, this doesn't look really good because there's too many bees in this brood box. It's a single 10-frame Langstroth brood box, bees covering every single frame and bees covering every single frame up in the honey super as well. So I'm looking at it and thinking This is why I really don't like Flow Hives. This is why Flow Hives are difficult to manage. Single brood box, one super, you can't add additional space. So what's happened here is it's the 5th of May or 6th of May, I forget what the day is, but they're swarming. And they've either swarmed already or they're in the process of swarming now as we speak because there's so many swarm cells in here and I've found already loads of emerging virgins. Probably my favorite term in the world, emerging virgins. And I've got 3 colonies over there that are queenless. I've taken emerging virgins and emerging cells from this colony here, gifted them to the queenless nucs over there. So I've used this problem to solve another problem. But what I want to do now is I just want to go through this colony and see if I can find the original queen, or at least see if I can find a queen of sorts. If I can find a queen, then I'm happy. I'll take down all of the cells. If not, I'm going to leave them one single ripe cell. I've got lots of brood, huge, huge amount of capped worker brood, very nice looking capped worker brood. I've got no eggs, I've got no larvae. So my mind is, I think they've swarmed. And what I'll probably do is just leave them with a single cell to requeen themselves. Absolutely tons going on though. I'm going to go through the frames now. I'm going to see if I can find anything. I'll show you some of the swarm cells as we go through. So this is what I'm seeing here, ready to emerge, perfect capped peanut-shaped swarm cell. Tons of these in here. I probably counted about 30 of them. You can see over in that corner as well, all of that propolis. Look how much propolis is there. Just wary that I don't want to kind of mess around with that swarm cell. So I'm going to scrape off the propolis and I'm going to continue looking through this colony. Beautiful frame of pollen there. This is the problem with this colony. There's just not enough space in the brood nest, even with 10 frames on the Langstroth. First week of May and it's full, full of bees, full of brood, full of pollen, full of stores. Honey super's full. We need to do something with these bees. So I've got another couple of swarm cells on this one here, fully capped over. I don't think I've got any in here that aren't capped over, so I'm not expecting to find the original queen. But what I do have there is an emerged cell as well, so I probably got a virgin running around in this colony, which means I'm pretty safe to take most of the cells. I will leave one just in case. And I'm happy to accept the risk that they might swarm by leaving one. Not much you can do in the Flow Hives, I'm afraid. But take a look at the propolis down in that corner again, like it's weighing down the corner of the hive. So that cell that you can see there, I showed this on a separate video, that is where a larva has fallen out and they've elongated it. That is a duff cell. You definitely don't want to use that to try and requeen. And not much to see on the rest of the frames here. I can't see a virgin anywhere, not much more propolis on this side, and no more queen And then we've got another cell there where you can see the queen's bitten around, got herself out, and she's probably in this colony somewhere. But I think I'm going to take down all of those swarm cells and just assume that we've got a virgin knocking around in here somewhere. If that's not the case, we can fix it at a later date, but I think that's the safest bet in order to avoid cast swarms. So I think this is probably my favorite video that I've ever done. We're not even finished, nowhere near finished yet. First off, I'm going to take that piece of propolis and put that up there in my propolis stash. We'll see how much of that we got at the end. I'm going to put all of the brood frames back in at the moment, taken down every single queen cell, and I'm working under the assumption that there is a virgin knocking around in here. But let's get upstairs, take a look in those honey supers, and see what they've put upstairs in the fake Flow Hive supers. Right, so I've got the fake Flow supers back on here now. As you can see, completely full of bees. It was really, really heavy. Let's pull out a couple of frames, see what we've got. So look at that, first week of May, and that is probably, I would say, 30 or 40% full, and they've even started capping it over as well. Can't believe just how much honey is in there. The method that we used to clear these out last year is that we nadired them, but we nadired them underneath a queen excluder. So we took the whole super, put it underneath the brood box, queen excluder in the middle. The bees took the honey, took it up into the brood nest, and left me with clean flow supers. See what else I've got in this box now. That frame there, even better. In fact, every single frame in here is basically the same. It's about 30 or 40% full. Strike that, probably 50 or 60% full going by the weight, and maybe 30 or 40% capped. So really, really happy with how these are performing. Performing just as well as the originals in terms of collecting honey. However, I've not tried extracting honey from these yet. Everything could go wrong when I extract it. And as I've said before, don't know the certainty in terms of the food grade of that plastic. Only with Flow Hive do you get the correct certification, which means that you can be safe in the knowledge that the plastic is not going to be leaching any nasties into your honey. If I was buying one of these for my garden, I know which one I would buy, and that would be the genuine Flow Hive, just to be on the safe side. But there's no denying that this works. They collect honey in there. They're doing really, really well in this wooden 10-frame Langstroth box. They have produced the biggest piece of propolis I think I've ever seen. I'm going to get out of the camera and just give you a close-up of that. Look at that piece of propolis there. I'm genuinely astounded by the size of that lump of propolis. I'm going to take that home and put that on my mantelpiece, I think. Fake Flow Hive working really well, giving me lots of, lots of challenges. Definitely swarmed, definitely produced lots of honey, definitely produced lots of propolis. Still going strong into 2023. Wonder what's going to happen next time when we come back to extract the honey in that super.
