I’m back! Did you miss me?
Look what I’ve got! It’s the Flow hive. Actually it’s not mine. I’m borrowing
it from a friend so that I can get some hands-on time with it and shoot a video about it.
But before I do that I want to mention something about the last Flow hive video I made.
Sometimes, we creators try to do something different or new and we make something and
we put it out there and it doesn’t always land the way we thought it would.
A year ago I made a video giving my opinion of the viral Flow hive video. This ended up
being my most disliked video.
But don’t worry, I’m not actually bothered by that. The video was mainly a reply to their
misleading marketing video and the even more misleading media coverage of it. Many of you
seemed to understand that, because it’s also my most liked video.
I stand by what I said back then and also acknowledge that I did make a few mistakes
in the scripting. But I’m not interested in rehashing it. I’m just going to let it
stand. The video’s still there so if you haven’t seen it, you can go watch it.
However, there is one thing I would like to apologize for. Many people saw the Flow hive
video and got really excited about beekeeping. Then they saw my video and they felt like
there was a bit of an “old school” mentality where people like me would not accept them
into beekeeping.
For that I sincerely apology. It has always been my goal to make the beekeeping world
more inclusive. I hope you can know that no matter what kind of hive you use, or how you
choose to keep bees, I think we all have the same goal and I will always welcome you into
my beekeeping family.
Okay, now on to the review…
There’s actually a lot I could talk about, but there are plenty of other videos out there
talking about those things. Including the videos and instruction on the Flow website
and YouTube channel. I’m just going to talk about a few things that I think are important
that I don’t think anybody is really addressing. That is:
the plastic frames, swarm control,
and overwintering.
If you’ve already bought one or plan on buying one I’m also going to be giving suggestions
to help you to be successful.
Many questions and concerns have been brought up about the plastic frames. Plastic is a
concern because some contain a toxic chemical called Bisphenol A, or BPA. It can leach into
our food and cause health problems. Flow’s website states that the cells in the frame
are made of a food grade, BPA-free Polypropylene. The same plastic that’s been used in beehives
and honey production for years.
Then there are the clear plastic parts on the ends of the frame that Flow says are a
“virgin food grade copolyester” that contains no BPA or BPS. That seems like a rather generic
description.
Looking at the recycle symbol marked on these clear parts, we can see it’s been tagged
with the number 7. First of all, this symbol doesn’t mean it’s made from recycled plastic.
Their website is very clear in stating it’s all virgin plastic. Not recycled. That may
be a concern to some people, since it’s adding to the abundance of plastic being produced.
But that’s outside the scope of this video, so I’m not going to go there.
The 7 indicates the category of plastic. In this case it means “other.” Meaning it’s
a plastic that doesn’t belong in the other 6 categories. This could include things like
polycarbonates that do contain BPA, but it doesn’t mean that’s definitely the case.
Flow doesn’t give the exact details on what type of plastic this is. They basically say,
“Don’t worry, trust us.” I don’t have any strong reason to not trust them, however,
their penchant for marketing spin and lack of full disclosure does make me raise an eyebrow.
If… I could actually raise one eyebrow…
I was also really surprised at how flexible the frames are. If you bend them enough they’ll
break apart. At first I wasn’t sure if this was a bug or a feature. But I checked Flow’s
website and saw that they do have instruction videos on how to take apart these frames and
reassemble them. And also tighten up these wires if they get too loose.
As an engineer, I really wanted to take these apart. But sadly they’re not mine and I
don’t want to risk doing any damage. But if you own some I highly recommend that you
take some time and practice taking them apart and putting them back together again.
“It’s quite easy to take a Flow frame apart. You can disassemble it simply by bending
it like so and then it will fall apart into its individual pieces.”
I don’t think it will void your warranty since they give instruction on how to do this
on their website.
I do wonder how long these will last in regular use. Bees like to coat everything inside the
hive with propolis. It’s a very sticky resin collected from trees and plants. And it’s
very good for the health and cleanliness of the hive. We often call it “bee glue”
because it sticks everything together. They really like to apply it between cracks and
wherever any hive pieces meet. Will these frames get gummed up with propolis?
Cleaning propolis can be difficult. It’s not water soluble. Fortunately these frames
come apart, but I don’t think that will really help.
On to swarming. If you don’t know what swarming is, it’s when a colony of bees basically
gives birth to another colony of bees. It’s how they reproduce. The when and why they
swarm has a lot to do with the seasons, how strong the colony is, and how much room is
in the hive.
All of the Flow materials, marketing, and how-to videos show a standard Flow hive having
1 box for the brood nest (that’s where they raise more bees) and another box for the honey-filled
Flow frames. This implies this is the recommended setup.
Managing a small hive like this does have some advantages, but it does require a little
more hands-on management. Flow is marketing this as a “less intrusive” way to keep
bees, unfortunately in most parts of North America keeping a hive this small may require
more intrusions. I’ll show you why.
Let’s take a look at the inside of the hive.
Every region has a different type of nectar flow. The nectar flow is what we call it when
there’s an abundance of nectar-producing plants in bloom and the bees are bringing
in a lot of nectar and storing it and processing it as honey. If you live in a region that
has a slow and steady nectar flow, this may not be an issue for you, but where I live,
the nectar flow comes on very fast, lasts a very short period of time, then it’s over.
Some areas have an even more prolonged nectar flow.
In this illustration, the blue represents the brood, and the gold represents honey.
Typically in a brood frame you’ll have honey in the corners. The upper area is where the
honey would be stored in the Flow frames.
If the workforce is really strong they could bring in enough honey to completely fill the
Flow frames and the brood nest below. This leads to a condition that we call “honey
bound.” The brood nest is full of honey and the queen has nowhere to lay eggs. This
can trigger a swarm instinct.
Swarming isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it’s generally advised to try to avoid
it for a couple reasons. They take most of the honey with them, and
if one of your goals is to harvest honey, then you’ll probably want to try to avoid
that. You lose your queen. She leaves with the swarm.
And raising a new queen without backup can be risky.
So what do you do?
Well, you could just let it happen. They’ll take most of the honey with them leaving you
without enough honey to harvest. And you’ll need to cross your fingers that they’ll
successfully raise a new queen, and that she’ll successfully take mating flights, and that
it’s not too late in the season for them to gather more nectar and store up enough
honey for winter.
Or you could try to manage the level of honey by harvesting more frequently and prevent
the brood nest from getting honey bound. This does seem to be the intended method and recommendation
by Flow. But the honey does have to be ripened before you can harvest it.
When bees bring nectar into the hive it’s full of water and they have to process it
and dry it out. Once the water content has been reduced to about 17% the bees will put
a wax cap over it, like a lid on a jar, and that’s how we know it’s ripe and ready
to harvest. If it’s harvested too soon it will ferment. And if the nectar flow is particularly
strong it may not ripen fast enough and they’ll have the hive full up with un-ripened nectar
before you can do anything about it.
Also, I don’t see a way to check if the majority of the cells have been capped without
opening the hive and lifting out the frames. The window on the side just let’s you see
the outside face of one frame, but you don’t have any idea what the other frames look like.
The back window is completely useless for seeing how much of the face has been capped.
When the hive is empty, you can kind of see in there. But when it’s full of bees there’s
no way to see past them.
Or a 3rd option, if you find this to be a problem, is to buy more Flow boxes and frames.
This is a very expensive option. These things aren’t cheap. I won’t bother calculating
the price difference between this and all the other methods of extracting honey. I’ll
let you do that for yourself.
But I will say that buying an expensive centrifugal extractor is not the only other option. I
harvest honey and extract it using equipment that cost me less than $35. It can be done
cheap. I’ve shown crush & strain extracting in a video before, but I plan to do another
video later this year, about how I remove the honey with very little disturbance to
the bees and extract it quickly and cheaply. If you want to see that video, click the subscribe
button and you’ll be notified when it gets posted.
Or another option to prevent overcrowding and a honey bound brood nest is to remove
frames from the nest and give them to another hive. This is a strategy used by some beekeepers
who use resource hives. That’s a technique I’ll talk about more in a future video.
This keeps the workforce relatively light and gives them more room in the nest. But
you do need to have additional hives that can use the frames and benefit from the resources.
This is also the most intrusive solution.
But swarms aren’t that big of a problem and you can probably learn to manage it in
a few years.
The biggest issue I think is getting the bees through the winter. The Flow hive instructions
and marketing would lead you to believe that you can leave the Flow frames in all winter.
That may be okay on the Gold Coast of Australia, but for most of North America and Europe,
that could be a disaster.
I’ll explain.
When there’s no longer any food to forage for, and it’s too cold to fly, the bees
need to have enough honey inside the hive to last through the winter. You need to leave
them enough honey to last until spring and the plant blossoms return. So these are your
Flow frames up on top, full of honey.
When the outside temperatures are less than 55 degrees (12 celsius) the bees cluster together
and share body heat. Represented here in red. The colder it is, the tighter the cluster
is. They need empty comb to be able to enter the cells and transfer the heat through the
combs. So the bottom box can’t be too full of honey. They’ll cluster just below the
honey, and eat it as their source of carbohydrate so they can have energy to stay warm.
They have to stay in close contact to the food, so the cluster moves up as they eat
the honey. Eventually, by the end of winter, they’ll then be located inside the Flow
super and clustering in the Flow frames. Can the Flow frames efficiently transfer heat
and keep the cluster warm? I don’t know. They seem too thick, so I have my doubts.
But without sufficient testing I can’t say for sure.
For the sake of moving on, let’s assume that that’s not a problem and the bees survive
the winter just fine. As the days get longer, the bees sense the approach of spring and
want to start raising brood. The brood needs to be kept at 95 degrees (35 celsius), so
the queen lays the eggs in the cluster where they can maintain that heat. They have to
also maintain close contact with the honey or they risk starvation. If they get too cold
they go into torpor and they can’t move to the honey.
So where is the queen supposed to lay the eggs?
You certainly don’t want brood in the Flow frames. Can the queen even lay eggs in those
cells? They seem too deep. And what size are those cells anyway? Let’s measure them really
quick and check…
To measure these cells it’s best to use the metric system since all foundation and
other cells are actually measured in millimeters. And to do it, the easiest way is to put the
zero mark on the outside of one cell and count over 10 cells.
Then on the inside of the 10th cell, read off the measurement. And this measures to
about 6.6 cm. So each cell, dividing by 10, is 6.6 mm. Which is interesting because the
foundation typically sold here in the US measures 5.4 mm. Small cell foundation measure 4.9
mm. That means these cells are much bigger than worker brood cells.
So I would probably guess that the queen cannot lay eggs, at least not worker eggs, in these
cells. If she did, I still don’t think she could because I think they’re too deep for
her to be able to lay eggs in. But if she did, it would probably just be drone brood.
If the queen can’t lay eggs in these cells then there’s no way for them to raise brood
until the cluster moves back down to the brood box. And why would they do that? It’s not
in their instinct.
If she can lay eggs in these cells, then you don’t want that. You can use a queen excluder,
which is a grid that has openings too small for the queen to fit through. This keeps the
queen out of the honey super. But the cluster of workers can still move up. When they leave
the queen behind, she’ll die. That’s why queen excluders are removed before winter.
It seems to me that you’ll have a dead, dying, or a weak colony coming out of winter
if you leave the Flow frames on. Obviously I haven’t had the opportunity to test or
witness this first hand yet. So currently I’m just speculating, but my experience
and understanding of honey bee biology makes this my number one concern.
So my recommendation is to remove the Flow frames before winter. That’s pretty much
what every beekeeper does. The honey supers go on in the spring, and come off at the end
of summer.
It kind of defeats the main selling point of the Flow hive. But come on, did you really
expect it to be that easy? Don’t believe everything you see in marketing.
“You mock my pain.”
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
I also recommend using 2 brood boxes. This may also help with the swarming issue. If
you want to use a queen excluder it would go above the 2nd box, below the Flow super.
At the end of summer, you would remove the Flow frames and harvest them. The queen excluder
comes off too.
As autumn begins to set in you’ll need to make sure that the top brood box has enough
honey in it to make it through the winter. If they don’t have enough, you may need
to supplement with sugar syrup.
My conclusions so far are: The plastic frames are a non-issue...for humans.
It’s still unknown and questionable if there’s any negative effect on the bees. More studies
need to be done. I’d like to see Flow disclose more information about what type of plastic
is being used. And I also desperately want to take one apart.
Swarm suppression may be a problem, but can be managed with experience.
Overwintering with Flow frames in the hive is my biggest concern. This, to me, is the
deal breaker and needs to be addressed and better understood. I think it’s best to
remove the Flow frames before winter.
How does it measure up to their marketing claims?
From the front page of their website:
“Less labour, more love” - That’s clever and catchy. I think I actually kind of like
it. It’s not entirely accurate, but I like it.
“Turn the Flow™ Key and watch as pure, fresh honey flows right out of the hive and
into your jar.” - I haven’t been able to test this yet, but from what I can tell
this seems true.
“No mess, no fuss, no heavy lifting, and no expensive processing equipment.” - Well,
I disagree with that last part. These Flow frames are very expensive. But 3 out of 4
isn’t bad I guess. Also, one thing to consider is that some places have laws that require
you to process and bottle the honey in a certified kitchen if you intend to sell it. So you might
want to look into that.
“Through the clear end-frame view, you can see when the honey is ready without opening
up the hive.” - I disagree with this entirely. There’s no way to see if the frame has been
fully capped without pulling it out of the hive. Certainly not through the windows.
“The extraction process is so gentle, the bees barely notice at all.” - This line
does bug me a little. How do they know if the bees “barely notice”? Anthropomorphizing
the bees is a silly marketing gimmick.
“Our revolutionary Flow system makes the extraction process far less stressful for
the bees and so much easier for the beekeeper.” - So does my method. Also, their hive system
doesn’t scale well. Once you have more than 2 of these hives, your expenses get much,
much higher.
If you’re an experienced beekeeper and want to give this a try, I’m not one to stand
in the way of scientific curiosity.
But if you’re a new beekeeper, I think this is not the hive to learn on. There are a lot
of unknowns, and the customer support at Flow is probably not going to be able to help you
through it. I’m sure they’re great at product and manufacturing support, but their
standard response to teaching any beekeeping skills or local know-how is to go seek help
from your local club. That’s generally good advice, but nobody at your local club has
ever used a Flow hive before. So they’re going to be guessing right along with you.
I do plan to follow-up with this hive throughout the year and into the next as my friend puts
it to use. I also have a few how-to videos coming up this year that might be of interest
regardless of what type of hive you have. So if you haven’t subscribed to my channel
yet, click the subscribe button and you’ll get updates when I upload videos.
I’ll see you next time.