The FlowHive is not for the professional beekeeper at this time.
@Rodderick touched on it, …invention has a premium cost. All unique products command a higher price firstly to recover the research and development and secondly because demand is still high for an item only available from the inventors.
Poor old FlowHive has copped a lot of flack over the price but the same people complaining would have no quarms at paying $900 for a smart phone which costs between $175 and $250 to make(depending on the brand) or pay $3000 for a computer which costs less than $1500 to build.
I have no doubt that in the future, when the company has been bought out by a multi national and all the manufacture shifts to China or Bangladesh and and the unit cost to buy a thousand units drops to $100 for an 8 frame FlowHive it may be viable commercially. But would they still want it?
Commercial beekeepers would probably need 1000 to 5000 hives at least to remain viable.
I get these horrible visions of future beekeeping in that video somebody liked a while back and I can’t find.
The other thing the FlowHive has done is to explode the backyard industry. Professional beekeepers are struggling to keep up with the demand for NUCs and Queens. 12 months ago I had a choice of 3 bee-keepers for NUCs, now I see there are now no new orders for Queens before March next year in my State. So bee-keepers are also getting some spinoff from FlowHives.
Best of all the bee population is expanding in a world trying it’s hardest to poison them out of existence.