David and Dawn's First Flow Harvest, Southern California, USA

The Arnia hive monitor? No, it can’t really do that. :wink:

I guesstimated it with my low-tech brain instead. :smile: I based my wild guess on the following thoughts:

  1. I always lost a fair amount of honey with the cappings. Even if you leave them in a sieve, you still don’t get it all. With the Flow hive, you don’t need to uncap. Either you drain the honey, or the bees get to to reuse it efficiently.
  2. It was impossible for me to get every last drop of honey out of the extractor. There were always a few reluctant tablespoons worth of honey left in the bottom
  3. My traditionally extracted honey always needed straining. So 2 sieves and one pair of tights trap quite a bit of honey. Even if I left it dripping for a couple of days, some was always lost. My Flow honey doesn’t need straining.
  4. The strainer needed to sit over a honey tank. Like the extractor, I always lost a bit of honey in the tank, either in the bottom of the tank or in the honey gate (tap at the bottom of the tank).

It is probably a huge overestimate, but I feel happy that I am wasting far less honey with the Flow frames than I would have by extracting the old way. I am probably just not very efficient in the traditional methods! :blush:

3 Likes