Beekeepers Corner Guestbook

Hi Kevin, I get a lot of questions about the Flow Hive. I believe you've mentioned it before but I wondered if you've tried it or if you have intent to do so. Here's a review of it that I've given my friends. The value of the flow hive, as opposed to other MUCH less expensive options, is in how easy it is to harvest the honey. If you want less work harvesting honey... then PERHAPS the flow hive is worth the money. The other part of the cedar flow hive that I rate very high is the quality of the craftmanship. The boxes themselves are really, really nice. Cedar will last essentially forever with just a nice coat of tung oil. Furthermore, it is just obvious that whoever is making these things put a lot of care into the design and execution of production. HOWEVER, with the problems of disease, pests, and pesticides marrying together for a terribly challenging landscape for beekeepers... this hive option will most likely NOT reduce the amount you should be going into the hive. I believe we need to be gathering data as beekeepers. We need to LOOK at the frames on which bees are working. Post-mortem analysis of a hive is too late to know what went wrong. AND you should have more than one hive... which makes the price-point for the flow-hive that much more overwhelming. I must declare that my analysis may be a little biased... my bees did not fare very well in the flow hive. The reasons for this were likely multiple and might not be solely because of the flow hive itself. But, one of my flow frames had a missing piece and ants got into the hive... those little buggars! Either way, I found the flow hive elegant yet at the same time (paradoxically) problematic. I also sort of doubt the plastic flow frames will do very well in the significant temperature fluctuations that we get in New England. A philosophical note: Bees have adapted to primarily nest in wooden homes with "homemade" wax furnishings. I think that it might be kind of weird for the bees to live in plastic. The plastic itself is relatively similar in physical properties to wax but it's still not the same. It could (I'm conjecturing here) be analogous to if we started using only stainless steel furniture without any upholstery whatsoever. So those are some of my thoughts about the flow hive. I don't really think that it will save much in the end and may end up costing you more than you'd like. I do appreciate the awareness that the flow hive has created regarding beekeeping in general! It's a really cool invention and I look forward to following the company's progress. Thanks so much for your work! Ben