COVER STORY
Cedar and Stuart Anderson,
co-inventors of the Flow Hive.
What’s
the BUZZ?
The Flow Hive has literally tapped into a highly lucrative concept: so compelling that a
Crowdfunding campaign launched to market the new design hit its target of $70,000 in seven
minutes. Eight weeks later, pre-orders topped more than US$12 million. Brian Wall reports
The Flow Hive design concept
started to take wing with the
thought that there had to be
a better way to get honey
from a bee hive – one that was more
gentle for the bees and a lot easier for
the beekeeper. Up to that point, Cedar
Anderson was extracting honey in the
conventional fashion, going through a long,
labour-intensive process that would take
all weekend, “making a big, sticky mess
in the shed,” he recalls.
“So, I came up with this idea of just
being able to turn on a tap outside the
beehive where the honey ows straight
out.” It sounds simple, but simplicity is
often only arrived at through a complex
process, as many an engineering designer
will vouch. And Anderson encountered
more than his fair share of ‘challenges’
along the way.
“The rst big hurdle was that honey,
being quite viscous, didn’t want to ow
out of the hexagon matrix easily. I would
get a piece of honeycomb, cut the front
and back off the comb and tip that on
its side, but the honey, although ready,
would not ow out. I had to think of ways
to overcome that, so I thought of little
robots that went along and sucked honey
out of each cell. I thought of piston
plungers that went down each cell
and I actually cast breglass
pistons that went down a cell
matrix to push the honey out.
That didn’t work very well.”
Next, he designed systems
where the capping – the wax
sheet they put over honey when it
was ready – would pull away inside the
hive and the body of the comb would move
backwards into those pistons. That didn’t
work either! “One morning I woke up and
thought, ‘Hang on a second. Maybe it
doesn’t have to be a hexagon matrix all
the time. Maybe it can be hexagons when
the bees are lling it and then change
into something else when it’s time to get
the honey to come out.’ So, I created a
simple, but elaborate, prototype using
basic tools like drills and bits of old car
tyre for a diaphragm. So I now had a
hexagon matrix that would split in the
horizontal direction. When they came
together, it would form honeycomb.
When they pulled apart, it
was like two mountainous
structures. When you
sucked on the tube from
outside the hive, the
parts would move inside,
creating a space inside the
comb where honey could
ow down and out.”
It was input from his dad Stuart,
co-founder of the Flow Hive, that brought
the real breakthrough. “After a few strong
coffees, my dad suddenly said, ‘How
about, instead of them going in this
horizontal direction, we go in a vertical
direction’, and just moved his hands like a
honeycomb cell splitting down the middle.”
This was their Eureka moment. “That was
the rst big win in what we call the vertical
separation method, which basically is the
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