(gentle piano music)
- My opinion of the Flow Hive 2 is very good.
If I were coming up with improvements for the Flow Hive,
you've pretty much touched on all of them.
- Hi, my name's Hilary Kearney.
I'm really excited about the new Flow Hive.
- I'm really happy to see that the guys
have continued to develop the design
and continue to develop a beautiful product.
It's going to encourage, hopefully,
another group of people to get into bee keeping
and enjoy their bees.
- There are so many things that I like about it
and I'll tell you why.
The integrated foundation that supports the hive.
It has those threaded legs, which allow you to level it up.
You don't have to guess about whether or not it's level.
You don't have to bring a level with you
because those little bubble levels
are already integrated into the wood work
on the back and the side.
Once everything is loaded on to it,
even when it's a heavy hive full of bees and honey,
you'll still be able to adjust it.
I like that, that pull away is vented
and you can decide how much venting
you want to allow to go through.
Critical during times of evaporation,
when they're taking the nectar down
and condensing it into honey.
The next thing is of course, the integrated shelf unit.
The shelf that is now composed of the pull out panel.
So it's all self contained, that's fantastic.
The fewer things we have to take to the bee yard
when we're extracting honey, I think the better.
I like the new inner cover design.
The fact that you can limit or prohibit the bees
from getting up into the gabled opened area
of that cover, that's a nice improvement.
Another thing that's a big bonus on the gabled roof,
people often worry about that slant
but having those thumb screws on the side,
you don't have to put anything else on it,
you don't have to strap it down.
That let's it securely attach that roof
to that upper box, which is your flow super.
This Flow Hive is such a work of art
with the laser cutting and how accurately it's made
and just the excellent look of it.
This is a show piece for your garden.
When you show your bees and you have visitors
and you're going to explain how honey comes out of it,
just a huge bonus.
So I absolutely like the new Flow Hive 2.
- My favourite thing is the stand.
I think I really have a hard time
finding stands that I like
and I usually end up building my own
and this one really looks perfect.
I love that it's just seamless in the design
and it's also going to be really useful.
I love that you can adjust the height.
I think that's going to really help people with lifting,
you can get your hive at the exact right height for you.
The other thing I really like is the back bottom board
where you pull out the mite tray.
Having that adjustable feature to
be able to let in ventilation or not.
I actually don't want ventilation getting
into my hives because of my climate
and so I'm excited that now
there's going to be a feature that
lets me just change that when I need it.
So it's going to be really cool.
- The original Flow Hive behind me,
we've had it at Australian Parliament for awhile now.
It's really impressive that it's worked
exactly out of the box as you would hope.
One of the really nice things I love
about the new version of the design
is how it's really gone that extra yards
to support natural bee keeping,
which I'm quite passionate about.
The level's built into the base
so you can actually keep your frames
and your levels really, really tight,
which is what you need for foundationless beekeeping.
But also the general ethos of the company
of just beautiful design that allows you
to keep bees in a really low stress environment
and also the mechanism of extracting honey itself.
You still have to check for disease obviously
in the brood box but the actual honey extraction
is just so much less stressful for the bees.
And I think that the new iteration of the design
really continues that.