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What Is a Flow Hive and How Does It Work?

If you have ever seen someone put a tube into the side of a beehive, turn a key, and watch honey flow directly into a jar, you were probably looking at a Flow Hive.

The first time you see it, it can almost look too easy. Where are the frames of honey? Where is the uncapping knife? What happened to the honey extractor?

Those things have not disappeared from traditional beekeeping. The Flow Hive simply gives you a different way to harvest honey.

And that is really the important part to understand. A Flow Hive does not change what the bees do. The bees still have to build and maintain their colony, collect nectar and pollen, raise young bees, and produce honey.

What changes is how you get some of that honey out of the hive.

It Starts With a Langstroth-Style Hive

Before we get to the part where honey comes out of a tube, let's look at the hive itself.

A Flow Hive is based on the familiar Langstroth-style beehive. At the bottom is a bottom board, which provides the floor of the hive and an entrance for the bees.

Above that are the brood boxes.

This is where the queen normally lays her eggs and where thousands of young bees are raised. The worker bees also store pollen and honey around the brood nest.

So far, there is nothing particularly unusual about what is happening. You still have a colony of bees living and working inside a hive.

The big difference is above the brood area, where the honey you plan to harvest is stored.

This Is Where the Flow Frames Come In

Instead of using conventional honey frames in the honey super, a Flow Hive uses specially designed Flow Frames.

These frames contain partially formed plastic honeycomb cells.

The bees do not simply find empty plastic cells and pour honey into them. They finish the cells with their own wax and then use them for storing honey.

As nectar comes into the hive, the bees place it in the cells and continue working it until it becomes honey. When the honey is ready, they cap the cells with wax.

Up to this point, the bees have essentially been doing what we would expect them to do in a conventional hive.

Now we get to the part that makes the Flow Hive different.

How Do You Get the Honey Out?

With a traditional honey frame, you would normally remove the frame from the hive, remove the wax cappings, and extract the honey from the comb.

With a Flow Frame, the frame stays in the hive.

When the honey is ready to harvest, you insert a special tool called a Flow Key into the frame and turn it.

Inside the frame, sections of the plastic honeycomb shift position. This creates a series of channels that allow the honey to move downward through the frame.

Gravity does the rest.

The honey travels to a trough at the bottom of the frame and then flows through a tube into your jar or other collection container.

That is the part you have probably seen in pictures and videos: honey flowing directly from the hive.

What Happens When You're Finished?

You don't throw the Flow Frame away, and you don't have to replace it with a new one.

After the honey has drained, you use the Flow Key to return the internal parts of the frame to their original position.

Then the bees get back to work.

They can remove the old wax cappings, clean things up, repair the cells with wax where necessary, and eventually begin filling those cells again.

The same Flow Frames can therefore be used for future honey harvests.

Do You Need a Queen Excluder With a Flow Hive?

A queen excluder is not universally required for a Flow Hive, although Flow recommends using one.

The reason is fairly straightforward. Flow Frames are intended to hold the honey you plan to harvest. Without an excluder, it is possible for the queen to move into the Flow super and lay eggs in those cells.

That creates a problem when it comes time to harvest.

The Flow Frame works by shifting parts of the cells to create the channels that allow the honey to drain. You would not want to operate that mechanism if brood were developing inside those cells.

A queen excluder helps prevent that from happening.

It is placed between the brood area and the Flow super. The openings allow worker bees to move through and store honey above while restricting the larger queen to the brood area below.

Why Would Someone Choose Not to Use One?

Not every beekeeper manages a colony in exactly the same way.

Some experienced beekeepers choose not to use queen excluders and prefer to manage where the queen and brood are located through other hive-management practices.

The amount of room available in the brood boxes can also make a difference. If the queen has adequate space below the honey super, she may be less likely to move upward and lay in the honey frames.

But that does not mean she cannot.

If you decide not to use a queen excluder, you need to know what is happening inside those Flow Frames before harvesting. Finding brood there after you have turned the Flow Key is too late.

So You Never Have to Open a Flow Hive, Right?

This is where the Flow Hive can sometimes give people the wrong impression.

Watching honey flow from a hive without removing the frames might make it seem as though you never have to open the hive.

You do.

The Flow system makes harvesting honey easier. It does not eliminate the work involved in keeping bees.

You still need to know what is happening inside the colony, including:

• whether the queen is healthy and laying;
• whether the brood looks healthy;
• whether the colony has enough food;
• whether there are signs of pests or disease;
• whether the colony is running out of room; and
• whether the bees are preparing to swarm.

Those questions don't disappear because there is a tap on the honey super.

You are still keeping bees, and those bees still need to be properly managed.

Is a Flow Hive Easier for a New Beekeeper?

That depends on what we mean by easier.

If we are talking about getting honey out of the frames, then yes, the Flow system can simplify that part of the process. You may not need to remove each honey frame, uncap it, put it into an extractor, extract the honey, and then return the frame to the hive.

But if we are talking about learning how to care for a colony of bees, the Flow Hive does not remove that responsibility.

You still need to learn about bees.

You also need to know when you should—and should not—harvest their honey.

Just because you can put a tube into a Flow Frame and turn a key doesn't mean it is always time to do it. The honey needs to be ready, and you need to consider the needs of the colony before deciding how much honey you can take.

What Really Makes a Flow Hive Different?

When you strip away the tubes, the key, and the unusual-looking frames, the idea behind a Flow Hive is actually pretty straightforward.

The bees are still bees.

They leave the hive to forage. They bring resources home. They raise brood. They maintain their colony. They produce honey and store it in honeycomb.

The Flow Hive doesn't change any of that.

What it changes is one part of the beekeeper's job: how the honey is harvested.

Instead of taking the honey frames out of the hive and bringing them to the extraction equipment, the Flow Frames allow the honey to travel through internal channels and out of the hive.

So when you see that jar sitting beside a Flow Hive with honey pouring into it, remember what you are actually looking at.

You are seeing a different way to harvest the honey.

The bees still did all the work of making it.

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