Beekeeping has been around for some thousand years, it’s roots may date back to 7.000 BC when the first beekeepers collected honey from wild bees in Asia Minor. Since then honey has been the “dish of gods” in Egypt 5000 years ago and medicine in ancient Greece.
In all that time, collecting honey was achieved by taking the honeycombs out of the hive and therefore disturbing the bees. But this is about to change as there is a new method that proves a lot more comfortable for the bees and the beekeeper …
The Anderson family have been keeping bees for three generations, but at one point they regretted bees being crushed when harvesting honey the old fashioned way. So the father-son-invention team started working on a new method.
Many rounds of trial and error later, they came up with a prototype with horizontally split cells. This was than replaced by the Flow Cell, prefabricated empty honeycombs that the bees will finish and fill.
At one side, the bees have access to the cells, while on the back there’s an observation panel. When the frame is filled to the brim with honey, you see it in the observation panel and can take action to harvest the tasty honey.
Harvesting honey with this Flow Frame is quite easy: where the observation panel is located, you have a tool cap at the top and a tube cap at the bottom. By inserting the tool, and twisting it about 180 degrees, you will crack open the sealed combs and the sweet honey will flow out through the tap.
Bees that are inside the cells wont be harmed, because there’s enough space for them to move and escape. So, the frame prototype was a marked success. Their invention was something that would change beekeeping forever, but it still was a prototype.
The clever duo figured out they would need about $70,000 dollars to build the molds and start larger scale production. They created an Indiegogo campaign, and within 15 minutes they already had $250,000 in pre-orders.
It became an overnight sensation, and raised over 4.2 million dollars until the end of the campaign, breaking several crowdfunding records and becoming the sixth-most successful crowdfunding campaign ever.
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