How long to ship to US

Flow Hive Purchasing, Shipping, Orders
1

I have read some of the previous posts regarding shipping time. If I ordered a full flow hive today how long would it take to ship to the US?

Thank you,

John

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2

Hi John, I bet @Faroe or @MartinB from Flow can give you real information, but I can make an educated guess. :blush: The hive I ordered with a February delivery estimate was delivered 2 weeks ago, and the frames arrived last week. The hives are made by Bee Thinking in Oregon, so they didn’t have far to ship to me in California. The frames are made in Australia. The Flow super I ordered with a March delivery date is now “Queued”, which means it will probably ship within 2 weeks.

When I just looked on the Flow web site, they are estimating delivery in April for current orders, so it would be reasonable to expect late April or early May, based on my experience. Having said that, the Flow team have thrown huge quantities of time and money at getting things to run a lot faster, so you might even get a mid April delivery! :smile:

3

Excellent, Thank you. Trying to line up getting the bees and having the box before those are supposed to arrive.

John

4

We can’t give you an exact ship date sorry. There is a shipping estimate of April - but we are shipping from USA and Australia to dispatch points around the world.
So, alas, I can’t say. We also have to allow for environmental and human factors that may get in the way of an exact shipping timeframe.

Once we get through the current 30,000+ deliveries and are delivering from stock that is in the dispatch centres, we will be able to give more real-time shipping timeframes.

Sorry that doesn’t really help much. Once thing I can suggest is to wait for the boxes to arrive before you order. Or depending on where you are in the US, you may need 2 brood boxes to winter your bee’s. So you can order one of these for you bee’s before the Flow Hive arrives.

:slight_smile: :bee:

5

OK, as @Faroe has brought this up (I wasn’t going to…), here are my thoughts. Even if you order a full Flow hive, you can never have too much equipment in beekeeping. I like to have at least 50% more of everything than I need, and if I had one hive, I would want enough stuff to run 2 hives. You never know when you might need to split an existing hive, or catch a swarm, or any number of other things. Yes there is more cost, but it also gives you a lot more flexibility.

So if you have the available funds, I would go to www.beethinking.com and order a complete 8-frame Langstroth hive kit from them. The wood will match your Flow hive, and you will get it in a couple of weeks. You can start your bees in that kit, and use the Flow parts when they arrive to expand it. As Faroe says, most people in the US run hives on double deep brood boxes, and the Flow hive only comes with a single brood box, so the equipment won’t be wasted or unused. Also the flat lids that come from Bee Thinking are very nice to use upside down during inspections - put the lid on the ground, and then you can put supers or deeps onto the lid when you have inspected them and need to get to the next layer down in the hive.

Here is the kit I was talking about:
http://www.beethinking.com/collections/langstroth-hives/products/cedar-beehive-kit-deep?variant=451337945

You can buy pine or cypress equipment much cheaper, but the above equipment is a much better match for the Flow hive.

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6

… and when you have 2 hives - I have enough equipment for 10 Nucs (2 Poly and 8 Card), 3 x 8 frame Langs, 2 x 10 frame Langs and a 10 Frame poly hive - I may just be ok for this season LOL

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7

Thank you. Sound advice!

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