Collecting honey is not only a laborious process for people, but it’s not especially a walk in the park for the bees either. Those bee keepers where protective gear for a reason. A revolutionary new invention is changing all that by eliminating the need for people to go tampering with bee hives through a spigot system that taps right into the honeycomb.
The product called Flow Hive, eliminates the traditional process of gathering honey by smoking the bees to calm them and then removing the comb with hot knives and loading them into a honey extracting machine. Father and Son beekeepers Stuart and Cedar Anderson worked on their system which drains the honey from already partly formed honeycomb cells for over a decade before reaching a product they were satisfied with. With the Flow Hive, bees enter the starter comb and finish building it with their wax, filling the walls with honey. By turning a tap on the outside of the hive, the cells split and form channels for the honey to flow down through a tube and into a container, leaving the bees relatively undisturbed. After the honey has been drained, the beekeeper can close the tap and the upper slot resets the comb and the bees start filling the comb up with honey all over again.
While it may not radically overhaul the way commercial honey is farmed, for amateur beekeepers, the Flow Hive will likely be a game changer. After all, why risk getting stung by pulling out a full comb of bees when you can just turn a tap to get some fresh honey?
