Since the only way that Honeyflow offers more information is if you give them your email address,:no: perhaps we could get Michael to confirm that he actually made the quoted comment, and offer us a few more details?“Mind Blowing...It's not very often something is so revolutionary as to blow my mind...Saving 20% of harvest labor is not trivial, 40% is amazing, 60% is revolutionary. But 95%, that’s Mind Boggling!”
That reeks of a scam.
I've fiddled with the idea many times. "Wouldn't it be nice if we could extract the honey without removing the comb from the supers?" The reverse operation would be just as appealing: "wouldn't it be nice if we could fill combs with feed directly?"
I don't believe this would be possible without some kind of pump and absurdly think and expensive frames. They don't show any of this, through the glass we can see what looks like completely normal frames.
Continuous drip also seems like a dubious claim, leading me to suspect they simply had a bottle of honey inside slowly pouring through their tap. First of all, they show some kind of timelapse where the jars fill up, completely open, for what appears to be hours. And nothing gets in! I scrape just a tiny bit of honey comb in my apiaries and within minutes it's a humming ball of bees or yellow jackets. They leave out honey for hours and not a single bee goes in the jar? Furthermore, bees don't harvest honey, they harvest nectar! Continuous-drip would suggest that whatever the bees put in the frames would flow, and flow right away, but that's obviously ripened honey in the video as it's very thick.
When they speak in front of the hive, the window seems to suggest there's a lot of bees on the frame behind it. If you actually stare at it while they talk, the bees don't move, except in just one shoot. Looks like they just slid a picture of a frame of bees behind there.
On the window that shows the sides of the comb, that looks awfully tight, doesn't look like there is bee-space between the comb.
They did give out a bunch of references one can easily contact, though. The professor's email, if someone wants to ask her if she was indeed talking about their product, is: Danielle.Lloyd-Prichard@newcastle.edu.au
Michael Bush is also on BeeSource, so I'd expect him to be able to comment on it.
Seems like someone found their patent application and put it on their facebook page.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20140370781.pdf
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It's not because it's been done a certain way for a long time that it can't be improved, but it's also not because it's new that it's better.Imagine if Beesource existed in the mid-1800's and L.L Langstroth posted that he had invented a way to keep bees, manage bees, collect honey and pollen, and he could do all of this without destroying the combs in the hive. Imagine the nay-sayers, "gotta be a scam" , "that's impossible", "can't be cost effective", "maybe for the hobbyist but not folks with dozens of skeps". lol
I thought of that pun too earlier today. Then I thought about honey and puns for morning tea and went off and had some.If not for Langstroth, we'd all be practicing SKEPticism lol
http://www.honeyflow.com/“Mind Blowing...It's not very often something is so revolutionary as to blow my mind...Saving 20% of harvest labor is not trivial, 40% is amazing, 60% is revolutionary. But 95%, that’s Mind Boggling!”
Michael Bush - USA
I read the patent I looks like they plan to imbed a heating element to help liquify the honey to get it to flow down through the channels, in theory it would warm up prior to opening them and would be too warm for the bees so they would leave the comb and not get squished in the process of sliding the cells. It's pretty ingenious if it works, but I fear heating honey comb and breaking it open will set of one heck of a robbing frenzyIt looks to me like they've patented the idea that you can cut hexagonal comb vertically into slats that, when every other slat is shifted upwards, turns it into channels that (in theory) drain downwards. So they have a patent on that idea. Then with a lot of money kick-started to them, they can explore the rest of the problem of how to extract honey by waving a wand over a closed box.