Ok good to get your perspective on the flow hives.
I was very well aware that hive maintenance was no different between standard and flow hives and that is made clear the guys selling it.
But harvesting the flow hives is just as hard and ‘more challenging’ than traditional hives is very surprising to me.
I am of course in no position to argue as I only started 4 weeks ago and have zero experience harvesting hives.
Gobsmacked none the less.
What you need to know is that my friend @JeffH is a wonderful old codger with many decades of managing hundreds of traditional hives. 
After so much experience for such a long time, traditional extraction is very easy for him. However, if you change his methods or routines, it will very likely become much less easy for him. He is set up to do fairly large scale traditional honey extraction, and he is fit enough to handle it easily. However, for him, Flow extraction is messy, time-consuming and unreliable. He has his perfected methods and Flow is superfluous. Never mind, I still love him and Wilma. 
I have a few decades of beekeeping experience too, but not with hundreds of hives. The most I have ever had at one time was 5, and that was more work than I had time for. Extraction was incredibly messy, time-consuming and hard work. We bought our first Flow hive during the initial launch campaign. When we did our first Flow extraction, my husband said that he never wanted to have to extract honey any other way. It went perfectly, and for us it was much easier than traditional extraction.
Jeff has a very smooth method set up and it works fantastically for him. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, I suppose. The nice thing about this forum is that there is room for all kinds of opinion and all types of beekeeping/honey production. Peace to all our friends! 
Yes, well said Dawn, if it ain’t broke fix it.
When harvesting last week I was thinking that I could be harvesting 4 at once continually moving from one hive to another opening the frames, in increments, instead of twiddling my thumbs for 10 minutes waiting for the drain.
I do 2 frames at a time and I’m averaging a bit over 3kg per frame so in the hour and a half it takes to harvest I could have a 20 litre bucket full, no mess no clean up no waste. Pretty hard to beat.
I still need to buy an extractor though for my build up of traditional frames… 
Thank you Dawn, it’s never been any more than 70 hives. Mostly around 40 on average over the past 32 years. Around 50 at the moment, however the strongest one only has half the honey super full of bees. Many down to single brood boxes. People keep buying colonies, which is compromising honey production. I think splitting & selling colonies is easier work.
This time last year I was doing an equal number of split, or possibly more as well as getting lots of honey. It’s been a terrible spring around my way.
I bet it seemed like a lot more when you had hives at that passion fruit farm! 
Some times beekeeping is a dream, but sometimes (rarely) it can be a nightmare - usually because of other people rather than the equipment. 
Extracting a Flow Frame is needing more care and so more challenging than a traditional frame if you want to do it correctly. Removing a flow frame to check that it is sufficiently capped is more difficult than removing a traditional frame, In a traditional box there is more room to move a frame sideways before lifting it out to check and there is much less propolize holding a traditional frame in place.
The majority of bee keepers who like me have both systems will say it takes longer to do a brood inspection with a flow hive if there is much weight in the super and it is too heavy to lift off as a single unit being common.
Both Flow Hives and traditional Lang’s have their own challenges for a bee keeper that you will experience for yourself. Neither is a walk in the park any more than the other in my opinion and I think that my bee keeping set up is fairly fine tuned for both. So do I regret having Flow Hives, heck no, after five years, and in the first year especially I had some big mishaps, but now it is just another way of extracting the honey and each way has its challenges.
I am a bit of a distracted person.
I start one job, find myself doing another while thinking about still another. So in a day I might complete one task quite different to what I started out to do and have about 7 half jobs completed. I have been known to exaggerate too, so maybe that’s a bit over the top but you get the picture.
The great thing about flow hives is, now I have adopted the tubes into the bucket method, I can start two frames, opening the first few cells and after 5 minutes open maybe half the cells and the go away and do something else. An hour later or when I remember, I go back open the frame completely and go onto another job or three. I have just spent half a day harvesting 4 frames and spent at most 30 minutes at the hive. Haven’t had to suit up, the bees are not disturbed, I have 1/2 a bucket of honey and a lot of jobs half done.
Flow hives are a backyarders dream. While very expensive, it is a great hobby and you get pure honey to boot. I don’t know what the economics are in large scale beekeeping but the professional beekeepers I have known, do not have the capital to contemplate buying 50 to 100 Flow Hives and there lies the story. We also do not know the longevity of the frames. Will they last 10 years or more to repay the outlay? How many cycles will a frame endue. We won’t know till we get there.
Me…if a frame breaks in a couple of years time I will just say,“well done frame” and buy a new one. That might not be good enough for the professional beekeeper. If the frames last 10-15 years then maybe there is something there for professionals.
Well said Wilfred, I do 3 frames at a time via plastic tubes into an air tight, so also a bee proof, lid on a honey pail and can do 2 hives at a time and while they are draining it gives me time to box up traditional frames of honey to take home for extraction so having some Flow Hives is a bonus for me in saving time, so Flow Hives work for me in combination with my Lang’s.
I am expanding my apiary with more Langstroth hives but the additional cost of a Flow Hive has stopped me going in that direction, and I figure stops them in a commercial set up where hundreds of hives are in use. But they are a great option for those that want a few hives as a hobby with the bonus of the honey.
Cheers mate
The way I see it is this: commercial beekeepers and backyard Flow Hive users is like comparing taxi drivers and sports car enthusiasts. They both drive cars, but have a very different objective. Taxi drivers complaining that sports cars are expensive and break down, are missing the point.
I’ve been trying to get into backyard beekeeping for more than 15 years. The single, and only thing that stopped me was the extra equipment and mess of harvesting. Flow Hives are the perfect solution for me. Yes, I may have to fiddle with harvesting but I couldn’t care less.
Hi @anon20442494, I am on the western edge of the scarp a little south of you between Armadale and Bedfordale.
I have a Flow Hive as well as a long hive with flow frames and a standard Langstroth hive. My flow hive is as supplied with the exception of the entrance which I modified to reduce robbing and a metal queen excluder. This year, I also added a second brood box as an experiment.
To answer your question on mat v board, not in the Perth Hills in my experience, unless you want to go to using hive mats for your personal preference.
I use the supplied crown board with the hole open. In general, the bees in my hive do not go into the roof space unless they start to get crowded. If the bees start to build comb up there then they are more than likely becoming overcrowded and or honey bound and intervention is required. I believe in minimal disturbance (inspections) of the bees and also believe in bee space above as well as below frames.
Both the taxi driver and the car enthusiast as you call it are enjoying what they are doing, hopefully.
So as I previously suggested why not set up you hives as they come and once you have some bee keeping experience if you find a way that better suits you then give it a try. Your knowledge will come from hands on experience if you need to fine tune your bee keeping to suit you. Nothing about bee keeping is ‘cut and dried’ and can’t be reversed.
One thing to remember about a flow frame is that it’s only a honey holding frame. It can never be used as a brood frame. In my semi-commercial operation, I’m constantly moving frames up or down. It would be a huge handicap if I couldn’t do that. As @Peter48 says, the flow frames are more difficult to lift in & out, which I have also found.
They are bulky, heavy & expensive compared to wooden frames. Wooden frames have too many advantages to be able to list them all.
I can’t see flow frames being remotely viable for commercial operators.