concept to pre-production model. “Once we
had our successful working prototype and
pre-production model, it was then a matter
of how we took that to market, such as
nding investors or selling on the concept,
including licencing it, and so on. I also kept
coming back to this idea of Crowdfunding.
It means you don’t have to make the hives
rst and store them as inventory.
“You don’t have to nd the money
upfront to create large-scale production
tooling. You simply have your design and
then secure the funding rst. We could
see Crowdfunding projects that had
implemented this formula successfully, so
those projects were already winners before
they ever went into production.”
With the help of his sister, who’d been
studying lm and working in the eld, a
Crowdfunding video was put together. “I’d
done some weekend courses in marketing,
so I had a good idea of what I need to
hit in the marketing script,” says Cedar
Anderson. “During our testing phase with
beekeepers, we realised the market wasn’t
as commercial as we originally thought.
The hobbyist beekeeper wanted the Flow
Hive straightway, whereas the commercial
beekeepers asked lots more questions and
were much more standofsh.”
What happened next was quite
extraordinary. “We dropped a teaser video
onto our new Facebook page. People just
loved it and started pressing ‘Share’.
Within 30 hours, we had a million views.
Then a week later, we launched our
Crowdfunding campaign and started
breaking records. In seven minutes, we
hit our target of $70,000. In two hours,
we hit a million dollars’ worth of orders
for our Flow Hive.”
And the record-breaking didn’t let up.
“Eight weeks later, we had the most
successful – and it still is – Crowdfunding
campaign on the Indiegogo platform, with
over US$12 million of pre-orders.” That
was great news – allowing for the fact that
20,000 Flow Hives had to be produced
in a short space of time! “That was quite
frightening, but we found the right factories
in Australia and the USA that could meet
the deadline. Basically, what we did was
to dial up a 24/7 production line for six
months straight.”
So how does the Flow Hive function?
At its core, there is a plastic foundation,
or partly-drawn foundation matrix, that the
bees cover in wax and build their comb
onto, to create the honeycomb. “Then
we come along from the outside, insert
something that looks like a long Allen key,
turn it and channels form inside the comb,
allowing the honey to ow down the inside
of the frame and into the trough in the
bottom and out of a tube into a jar. At the
turn of a handle, you’ve got beautiful, fresh
honey that needs no further processing.”
With a conventional set-up, you have to
don a bee suit, smoke the bees, pull apart
the hive, remove the frames and take them
to a processing shed or laundry. “You then
have to cut the wax capping off the frames
with a heated knife, put those frames into
a centrifugal extractor, spin that up to a
high speed and spin that honey out. It hits
the stainless steel walls of the extractor,
goes down to the bottom, along with bits of
wax and bee bits etc.
“From there, you go through a process
of settling and then ltering your honey, in
order to get it to a good product. If that’s
not enough hard work, you have to then
go back to the hives, get in your bee suit
again, pull the hive apart, put those frames
hopefully back in the same hive, so as not
to spread disease – and the whole process
then starts all over.”
COVER STORY
There are other benets from the Flow
Hive approach, too, he points out. “One
is that the honey tastes better, because
it’s got zero processing and you’re able to
isolate single-frame avours. You can drain
each frame into a jar, whereas it was not
practical to do that conventionally.”
On a worrying note, Anderson points
to diminishing bee numbers, something
that has been in the news for a number
of years. “We’re happy to say that, just
from our customer base, we’ve added
10% to that number.” More beekeepers
means more of them advocating for the
environment and ecosystem the bees
need, in order to thrive. “That is a really
important piece of the puzzle,” he points
out. “We’ve also installed built-in features
that help the beekeeper look after their
bees, integrating pest management into
the base of the Flow Hive, as well as
enabling the beekeepers to observe what
is happening within the hive.
“We’re seeing a very passionate
community of beekeepers that has sprung
up around our invention. We’re proud that
about half of our 60,000 orders of Flow
Hives, in 130 different countries, are new
to beekeeping. We’re creating content
every day on our website to support their
beekeeping learning journey.”
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