G'Day

[PeterD]

Greetings from Western Australia.
A search on "Flow"hives brought me to this forum. I am organising a Field Day here in Western Australia on April 10th, with a prominent focus on the Flow hive at which Stuart Anderson will be presenting in person. Normally our audience is established and commercial beekeepers, but with so many new beekeepers taking delivery of these hives we thought it time to try and gather them together for some helpful communication. Meeting your fellow travellers in the company of those who have travelled the path before is a great way to head off problems before they develop!
Reading this forum's flow hive thread has been a useful insight for me into what UK beekeepers are experiencing in adopting this new technology. Many similarities with the situation here. Right now in Western Australia is a very difficult time for establishing new hives, even for experienced beekeepers. Our season has been the worst most have experienced for a very long time, although for the large scale migratory outfits with good equipment, sites in the (few) right places, and youth on their side, reasonable and in some cases good crops, have been attained. But I am sure all will agree it has been a punishing schedule!
A change in the weather over easter has produced some good rainfalls in the south west of our state where most beekeeping happens. After a long, dry, and very hot summer, those of us who have not been so fortunate in the honey stakes, are looking forwards to some late autumn and winter floral response with the opportunity to revive demoralised hives and perhaps produce some new honey crop for extraction.

My thoughts on the Flow hive technology...despite an almost universal
rejection by commercial beekeepers as a gimmick with no relevance to them,
I genuinely believe that it will become a valuable tool in commercial honey production in the future. Its a paradigm change in the making. Man made very little progress in his efforts to fly until he switched from jumping off from high places and flapping artificial wings strapped to his arms, to using fixed wings and a source of power to drive propellors! Look what we have now!
Likewise I am sure that some very clever engineers are at this moment in the process of utilising and revising the concept of vertical comb splitting and draining out the honey to devise a new system compatible with efficient field harvesting of large numbers of hives simultaneously.
I hope I am still around to enjoy the benefit!

 

[Hivemaker.]

My thoughts on the Flow hive technology...despite an almost universal
rejection by commercial beekeepers as a gimmick with no relevance to them,
I genuinely believe that it will become a valuable tool in commercial honey production in the future.

Welcome, Pete.

How many of your 1000 hives have you converted fully to using flow frames?

 

[Plenty of honey]

Welcome to the Forum PeterD, hope you find it useful.
Theres certainly a lot of lively comments and interesting debate about the Flow hive. We've all got our own ideas about it and some of the forum members are in possession of the said item and are hoping to report back of their experiences this year after their harvests.
Personally for me, the spring harvest which always crystallises very quickly, i would say its a non started but we may learn to use or adapt things in the future.
Its important to never Snub things , after all , isn't that how we got where we are today!!
Can you keep us up to date with what you learn from your presentation from Stuart Anderson ? perhaps you could film the presentation and post to youtube, so we can all see it.

Richard

 

[pargyle]

Likewise I am sure that some very clever engineers are at this moment in the process of utilising and revising the concept of vertical comb splitting and draining out the honey to devise a new system compatible with efficient field harvesting of large numbers of hives simultaneously.
I hope I am still around to enjoy the benefit!

Well good luck with that ... with 1000 hives you must have invested enough cash in flow frames cash to seriously to think about retirement if you hadn't spent it ... So - how many are now equipped with flow frames and how many flow frames per hive do you have ?

Sadly, I think the weather and forage in the UK are going to defeat any prospect of flow hives returning sufficient benefit to make the investment economicaly viable .. coupled with the fact that the vast majority of UK beekeepers do not have Langstroth hives and there is a compatibility issue for anyone who cannot or will not afford to displace their existing hive formats in favour of Langstroth. We may find that only a few experienced beekeepers over here are trying them out .. and a lot of new beekeepers may struggle to overcome the basic challenges of beekeeping - regardless of having to make the flow concept work in our beekeeping climate. So .. we may not get a completely true picture of whether they really are a viable product in the UK ... time will tell and as I said, initially, good luck and let us know how you get on.

 

[charlievictorbravo]

Your season in WA has been disrupted by hot dry weather that has stopped nectar flow. You've had temperature in the 40s. Last year in SW England we had wet, windy and cold weather when our flow should have been on and beekeepers were lucky to get a crop - the highest temperature was about 30°. Many beekeepers in the UK are converting from 18mm wooden hives to polyhives to help the bees even out the temperatures.

I have wooden hives but keep them insulated with a "cosy" made of 50mm of rigid urethane insulation - a bit like a fairly tight-fitting very deep roof that covers the brood box in the autumn/winter/spring. In WA, a cosy might help to reduce hive temperatures in the summer but I'm not about to tell you how to keep bees in that climate. I spent 3 days on Rottness Island once and each day the temperature hit 40° so I know just how hot WA can be.

It would not be possible use a cosy with a Flow Hive without some major alterations to remove knobs and latches, etc. What we need to try to replicate is the conditions under which the honeybee evolved - hollow trees with 15cm of wood around them and 100cm of wood above and a small entrance. The Flow Hive is never going to be able to do that - the wood's too thin and there are too many openings.

If you happen to meet either of the Andersons at your meeting, pass on my congratulations for a really clever piece of design and for the way they have conducted the business of the Flow Hive since the crowd-funding went through the roof. There were some on this forum who thought they'd take the money and run - instead, they have created a vibrant company, near enough hitting its delivery deadlines, offering real beekeeping advice for beginners and bringing newcomers into beekeeping; what's not to like?

The next bit of design to be tackled is a poly Flow Hive.

CVB