Dive Brief:
- An Australian father and son team has invented a new type of beehive — the Flow Hive — that enables beekeepers, both professionals and hobbyists, to harvest honey in a way that is easier and attracts fewer bee stings than the traditional method.
- According to The New York Times, "The frames in their Flow Hive contain honeycomb cells made of plastic as well as wax, and they open when the beekeeper inserts a keylike tool into the hive’s side. The honey drains through a short tube, and the hive has a clear plastic panel that lets beekeepers gauge the honey level."
- To mass produce the hives, the father and son started an Indiegogo crowdsourcing campaign to raise a target of $70,000. They ended up with orders totaling $12.2 million worth of hives and frames, a record for an Indiegogo campaign.
Dive Insight:
Crowdsourcing has become a popular way for companies to raise money to create and manufacture new products. Technology, video games, and Hollywood movies tend to raise the most money in these campaigns, and Flow Hive isn't particularly high-tech. However, according to its inventors, it is a transformative technology that solves a widespread problem for beekeepers. This enabled the invention to sell in the U.S. and about 150 other countries and is attributed to the Flow Hive's massive success.
Flow Hive has attracted some criticism, such as from beekeeping naturalists who believe that this method is too mechanical and exploitative and doesn't respect the cautious process of extracting honey from bees, according to LancasterOnline.
Others thought the product was too expensive or complained that beekeepers have to extract all of the honey from the hive at once rather than being able to turn on and off the tap. Still, this technology has clearly caught on and may be able to do something about the current issues for beekeepers, wherein they lost about 42% of their colonies in the year ending April 2015, as compared to approximately 34% in the year ending April 2014.