>If I do decide to go with the flow hive will this mean I do not need to purchase the extraction equipment for my hives?
You already didn't need to purchase an extractor to harvest honey, but now you can extract without purchasing an extractor...
http://www.bushfarms.com/beesharvest.htm> I know the flow hive is expensive but if you factor in tha there is no extraction equipment needed and the time saved it maybe not be so expensive after all?
Certainly you can subtract out what you might have spent on a extractor, but one super of them costs as much as an extractor. I'm not saying it's a bad investment, but extractors are a poor use of your money if you only have a hive or two. Yet people buy them all the time.
Synopsis of what I think of the flow hive:
1) It works
2) It is the coolest beekeeping invention since Quinby invented the smoker we all now use.
3) It is currently overpriced (at least for me). It is not in the realm of being financially feasible on any scale right now, but then they were trying to launch it and I?m sure the price will come down eventually. Judging by their sales, they apprently UNDERPRICED it, but for me for practical purposes it's too expensive to buy very many. But then the first big screen TV I saw was priced out of the realm of practicality too as were early computers. To put them on my 200 hives would cost $82,000 and it would take me a long time to recover that investment, especially since I already have an extractor.
4) The presentation is a little misleading, though probably not intentionally, as most advertising is, and as any oversimplification of a topic is. You can?t just go out to the beeyard and run enough honey for your pancakes and then turn it off. You will have broken open every cell in that frame? You need to wait until it?s capped and then you need to harvest it all. But otherwise, yes, it?s that easy.
5) I?m not sure yet how it would change my management IF it was cheap enough to buy some more, but I?m sure it will require some adjustments. There are some experiments I would want to run to see how things work out. It might be possible, since it?s too deep for the queen to lay in and not the right diameter for either workers or drones, to put it on the bottom of the hive so you wouldn't have to move it? but I won?t know until I have time to try it.
6) You still have to LEARN to manage bees and you still need to MANAGE them. This device will not prevent swarming, it won?t fix brood diseases or mites, it won?t magically do your beekeeping for you. But it will make harvest much easier and less messy. It will probably make management slightly more complicated, or at least different.
7)It remains to be seen how it will age and how long it will last etc. It?s a new product and while Cedar and Stuart have been testing it for years, that is on a small scale. The large scale test is yet to come.
You can keep bees for almost nothing if you build your own top bar hive and you do crush and strain. This is the opposite. It's not necessary, but if you have the money to spend, it is a very cool thing to play with. Honestly I don't see how any beekeeper with some spare cash could resist it.