The flow hive must put half their profits into marketing.
If you’re asking about the flow hive, you’re probably not a beekeeper yet. The reason for this is that flow hives are very specifically marketed at one demographic: People who don’t know better.
Go to their website - every single video is some hippy 20-something influencer and their kids saying “look how easy keeping bees is! we get honey on tap and don’t need to open a hive!”. Wrong. You do need to open the hive, unless you want to kill bees.
There’s a very good chance that you’ve been linked to this page after saying something along the lines of “I want to keep bees, should I get a flow hive?”, and if that’s the case then our advice to anyone who wants to get a flow hive thinking that it will make beekeeping more easy: go on a practical course. It will cost you not a lot of money and you’ll get hands on experience with the bees, and will help you understand why keeping bees isn’t just as simple as putting bees in a box and stealing honey.
Our documentation on the best way to start beekeeping can be found here. There you’ll find a bounty of information, and our guides will help you understand what will be needed from you as a beekeeper regardless of what hive design you choose.
The flow hive itself is designed to solve one thing, and that’s extraction. Extracting honey from a hive is a fairly complex process with multiple steps, and often expensive equipment. The supers need taking from the hive, the frames need uncapping, then they need spinning in an expensive extractor, stored in buckets and let to sit for a while, and then bottled into jars. The flow hive lets you crack individual frames and bottle them straight into jars directly from the hive.
It’s also a hell of a lot cheaper than buying a hive, an extractor, the buckets, the strainers etc… for now.
See, this is the problem. A flow hive costs just a bit less than buying a hive and extractor. Why? So that the unsuspecting novice thinks “why on earth would I buy all this expensive steelware when I can just buy this? why hasn’t anyone thought of this before?”. I’ll let them in on a secret: they had.
A colony of bees need inspecting regularly to ensure that they aren’t harboring diseases, and that they are healthy. Two diseases that are particularly problematic are AFB and EFB. These two diseases are often notifiable diseases, which means that beekeepers are legally obligated, under the thread of huge fines or even imprisonment, to notify the government agencies for beekeeping if they find occurences of these diseases in their hives.
The flow hive super weights 8 kilos right out of the gate. Once it’s full, we’re looking at upwards of 30 kilos. That’s an unreasonable weight for anyone with back problems, or simply doesn’t have the muscle mass to lift it. As such, it actively discourages inspections of the colonies and causes slow deaths of the colonies housed inside them, and ultimately to the spread of disease and parasites.
More information on those diseases and parasites can be found over at our Varroa section, and our Diseases section
There is one use case for a flow hive. One. And it definitely doesn’t outweight the detrimental impacts of never inspecting a colony.
You only want one or two hives, don’t have the space for an extractor, and you will never want any more.
If you want any more than two hives, find space for the extractor, because you’re going to want one anyway. Cracking frames from the flow is not a “turn the key, the honey pours out and you go home”. It takes ages… and being sat in a field waiting for the hive to empty itself is going to get boring really quickly. If you want to do more than one or two hives, you’re going to want more buckets, more hoses, and all of that means more cleaning.
The economics of flow soon wear thin once you move past one or two hives; and once you’ve bought yourself into the ecosystem, it’s even more painful to leave it, because you’ll need to buy an extractor anyway.