I don’t why I find that so amusing… ‘a typical squeeze bear’…
it’s like its a standard unit of measurement: ‘How many squeeze bears in that frame of honey? ’ or "the average American eats six squeeze bears of honey per anum’.
17,600 x 8 = $140,800 USD- or $180,600 AUD!
CRIKEY!
That’s interesting Jeff: I have never heard of people actively removing or ‘destroying’ (?) pollen filled comb to limit bee access to pollen stores as part of a swarm prevention stratgey… Couldn’t you just use pollen traps at this time instead to reduce the amount of pollen entering the hive? Save you having to go in- and destroy- and you could dry the pollen and save it for feeding back to the bees at a better time- or eat it yourself?
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.
Agree that this is an interesting idea. I haven’t used this for swarm prevention but I have definitely been through periods where the brood box becomes pollen bound/pollen locked extremely quickly (dandelions!) and I have had to pull frames to free up laying space. Pollen traps come in handy for more than just collecting pollen for consumption!
Touching on what busso said about colonies not being available here.
I went in to check on when my nuc would be available from a reputable bee supply store. The orders book was looked up and, with about 10 names per page, I was on page 7 and the order was placed in November last year. I was told normally 300 nucs was a lot now there are well over 1000 orders. September next year are count supply dates. The sales person directly stated that this was solely due to the Flowhives.
Honey bees aren’t in trouble in this part of the world that’s for sure.
So commercially, for bee breeders, Flow is great. Probably bring in more money than the honey side.
With this kind of supply and demand, as they wouldn’t take a deposit or payment at the time of the order, I just wonder how much more than $150, last Novembers price, I’m going to need to fork out next month when I pick them up…
Hi Jack, I simply cut the comb out between the wires, hopefully the wire doesn’t break, clean the frame up a bit & put in a fresh sheet of foundation. There’s more to pollen traps than meets the eye. Firstly you have to harvest it frequently, if it rains, it gets mildewy, SHB love to lay eggs in it. Plus I never know which hive is going to fill whole frames with it. I never get periods around here where pollen is in short supply. If I do, I welcome it, at least then I can take my attention off swarm control & concentrate more on other things.
I retrieve the wax & the pollen forms part of the slumgum which my vege garden worms love.