#FLOW HIVE BEEHIVE SERIES#

#FLOW HIVE BEEHIVE SERIES#

During the past year, I have organized two local beekeeping meetings with presentations by the inventors, participated in their “Meet the Beekeeper” film series and was hired to write several educational articles for the Flow Hive blog. I am not being paid to write this article. I put them to use in the spring, but had not harvested honey until just last week.

In the fall of 2015, the company sent me a complete Flow Hive kit and an additional Flow Super at no cost. I teach hundreds of new beekeepers each year, many of which have Flow Hives. I decided to keep an open mind, mostly for the sake of my current and future students. When the news of the Flow Hive invention first broke, I was a skeptic, like many others. I have been keeping between 20 and 80 hives for the past seven years. Beekeepers are infamous for our diverse and contrasting opinions, but the controversy over the Flow Hive is so extreme that it cannot even be mentioned without sparking a civil war among beekeepers. So, is the Flow Hive what its opponents claim it to be: an evil invention designed to enslave bees for honey? Read on to get my take.īefore I go any further, I want to be up front about my experiences with beekeeping and the Flow Hive because I have noticed many of the articles written on this subject have been written by people who are either new to beekeeping or people who have never used the Flow Hive. Since they are made with leftover wood, there are only a limited number of Flow Pollinator houses.The drama surrounding the Flow Hive is unending and riddled with misinformation.

By creating this habitat in your backyard, together we are building the stepping stones across the urban landscape which may just help save some of these important species from the brink of extinction,” said Cedar Anderson, CEO, and founder of Flow Hive.

We created this upcycled pollinator home to provide a safe place for solitary bees to raise their young while offering our customers a fun, family-friendly project to build together. “The honey bee is one of 19,000 bee species in the world that are essential to pollination and life on this planet as we know it. The Flow Pollinator House comes flat-packed as a DIY kit, complete with everything you’ll need to build it – a perfect summer project! Customize the layout by arranging the wood tubes and design the exterior to your liking with stain or paint. It encourages them to work nearby, pollinating gardens, flowers, and other plants in the local community. The house offers protection for hard-working native solitary nesting bees. They upcycle the sustainably sourced bamboo and salvage Araucaria timber from the production of the Flow Hive models which were all used in making the Flow Pollinator House which is an extension of the models with more design tweaks that make it efficient. The process of making the Flow Hive results in cutoff waste, so the company decided it was time to make use of it. It has a unique yet simple mechanism that releases the honey straight into jars without the troubles of traditional harvesting! This bee shelter and hive is made by a father-son duo who took a different approach to honey harvesting that is less stressful to the bees and their keeper. The Flow Pollinator House not only benefits bee populations in your yard, but all the proceeds go towards advocacy groups across the country. These beehives are good for the bees, innovative, reduce waste, and are so efficient that you actually get honey on tap…literally! Beekeeping is an ancient practice and beehives have hardly gotten design upgrades but Flow Hive is changing the game. Bees are essential to keeping multiple ecosystems in balance as they pollinate trees and crate food for other animals – they are essential for our survival! Now coming to the little ‘sweet’ things we all love about bees is that they also produce honey.

Flow hive beehive