These Easy-to-Use Bee Houses Give You Honey on Tap

If you’ve toyed with the idea of overseeing a colony of bees but have found the process of harvesting honey a bit overwhelming, a new at-home hive option called Flow Hive streamlines the honey harvesting process and makes keeping bees less stressful for both you and the colony inside. (And having honey literally on tap isn’t too shabby, either.)

Flow Hive, which comes in four different models, is a hive shelter that is built with a mechanism that releases honey straight into jars. There’s the Flow Hive Hybrid, the brand’s entry level bee house, Flow Hive Classic, which is slightly bigger, Flow Hive 2, which comes with additional features like ventilation control and an extra observation window, and Flow Hive 2+, equipped with beehive health management.

Regardless of which one you get, they all are sustainably made and allow you to harvest honey with ease while keeping your bees happy and safe. The bee house comes with two frames that consist of partly formed honeycomb cells, which the bees will complete with their wax and fill with honey before capping them out. From there, all you do is insert the honey tube into the honey trout, rotate the Flow key, and out comes honey on tap.

After creating several Flow Hives, the company was left with sustainably sourced bamboo and salvaged Araucaria timber waste. So, it decided to turn the leftovers into something new called the Flow Pollinator House.

Built entirely from scrap materials, the Flow Pollinator House gives native solitary bees shelter and encourages them to raise their offspring and pollinate nearby gardens, flowers, and other plant species. These shelters create “pollinator corridors between our wild spaces for habitats affected by land clearing and urbanization,” the Flow website reads.

Flow Pollinator House kits come flat-packed and are easy to assemble with the included tools and materials. You can customize the layout of your bamboo tubes and then paint or stain your house to your liking.

There are only a limited number of Flow Pollinator Houses available for sale because of the fact they are being built with scrap materials. With every house bought, Flow is donating 100 percent of all proceeds to U.S.-based pollinator advocacy, education, and protection groups.

Working in tandem with a Flow Hive, you could create the perfect bee-happy environment in your yard and reap the sweet rewards by way of your very own native honey.