The Flow Hive

There has been some coverage in the press about a new type of bee hive, the Flow^tm hive, that will ‘revolutionise’  bee keeping and much has been made of the fact that the two Australian inventors raised over £1m in a day selling their invention on a crowdsourcing site.

In a conventional hive honey is extracted from frames called supers and I describe the process on the website at http://northbedfordshirehoney.com/honey-extraction.

The Flow^tm hive works by having special frames with part completed comb cells which the bees build up, put nectar in which they convert to honey and then cap the cells as they would do in a normal hive. The Flow^tm hive is different in that when a crank is turned the frame spits converting the closed cells into a series of channels down which the honey ‘flows’ into a channel at the bottom of the hive. The honey piped outside the hive.

The crank is then turned back and the bees eat through the cappings on the cells and start the process again.

Does it work? I don’t know but there again nobody really does as they haven’t been made yet and they won’t start to be delivered until June.
However from what I’ve seen and read , it looks like an ingenious engineering solution to a problem. Unfortunately it seems to me to be a solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist. Honey extraction is something that is only done a couple of times a year and although a bit of a slog, isn’t really a big issue. Had they invented something that effectively fought Varroa or helped in swarm management that could well be ‘revolutionary’

The two Australians who invented the device seem to be genuine people but they are often described as ‘part time inventors and backyard bee keepers] which makes we wonder if this isn’t just a technical exercise. I wonder how it deals with the tube such becoming clogged [taking the hive apart each time to clean it?] and how it deal with honey that crystallises quickly like OSR or heather and cooler weather that would slow the flow of honey

There have been comments in support of the system like “its good for people who want their own honey but are afraid of bees” and “It’s a great way to get started in beekeeping without all the bother.”, and  “You can get all the benefits of a bee hive without having to deal with bees!” which reinforces my view that it's something for people who don’t like bees and are only interested in the honey.
If people ‘are afraid of bees’, don’t want the ‘bother’ and don’t want to ‘deal with the bees’ they shouldn’t be keeping bees. Bees have enough on their plate without having to be looked after by somebody who can’t be bothered to look after them properly.

Part of the promotion of the hive is a nicely put together video which has the required blue sky time lapse photography. Two things strike me about the video. Firstly there isn’t a bee to be seen anywhere outside the hive. In my [bitter] experience a few drops of honey carelessly dropped, and a Waggle Dance later, every bee and in the neighbourhood knows all about it and comes calling. Wasps will pay a visit as well. If the tubing leaks, even a tiny amount, the hive will become a free MacDonalds for bees. Not good if you ‘are afraid of bees’ don’t want the ‘bother’.

The second issue relates to a personal hobby horse of mine on which I have already ranted about in a previous blog. It's what I call the ‘Langstroth Principle’. Langstroth was an American pastor who effectively invented the modern bee hive which was genuinely revolutionary. He said ‘The Creator intended the bee for the comfort of man, as truly as he did the horse or the cow’ Although said by a religious man in the 1850’s, I think it perfectly illustrates our current attitudes to animals and nearly everything else – ‘every thing is for our enjoyment and consumption’ .
At one point in the video two smirking hippies [probably their target audience] are seen holding a tray of waffles under the flow tube and slowly smothering them in honey, beside themselves with joy and safe in the knowledge they aren’t disturbing the bees . Apart from the fact that the bee hive entrance is  about a foot away and their precious waffles would be covered in bees [that they don’t want to deal with] in seconds, it perfectly illustrates the Langstroth Principle.
Intentionally or not the hive becomes a vehicle for satisfying our need to consume what we want, when we want it and with as little effort as possible.
It simply converts a bee hive into a vending machine.

A few days after it's release the American courts have granted a patent for a hive that is virtually identical to the Flow^Tm hive except it's made of metal.
In the patent it says the work of collecting the honey, which is long, fatiguing, and even dangerous, is converted into a short and easy operation, which can be performed by any person.
Long?, possibly [the Flow hives takes two hours to empty in warm Australian weather], fatiguing?, possibly and obviously a little physical effort is bad for you, and dangerous?. Crap.
If a patent appears so quickly after the release of the Flow hive, I expect it won’t be long before cheap Chinese copies that don’t work will appear on beeBay.

Time will tell if it's revolutionary or not. I seem to recall Clive Sinclair described the C5 as revolutionary.