Overview
Urban beekeeping will never be the same. A brand new Australian-designed beehive has raised over $1 million on Indiegogo in less than three hours. Why? The honey's on tap, straight from the hive.
New South Wales beekeepers and Lords of the Bees Stuart Anderson and his son Cedar have devised a brand new means to collect honey without disturbing the bees, meaning the golden, sticky goodness flows out of a tap using a channel system. This means you can literally put your toast under a tap at the hive. Looking to the crowdfunding platform, the Andersons hoped to raise $70,000 to help their invention, Flow Hive. The pair have now raised a whopping $2,588,820 USD — that's $3,304,369 AUD. BOOM.
So how does it work? Stuart Anderson talked the ABC through it. It all hinges around a plastic frame design, on which the bees get busy building their honeycomb. Twisting a lever allows the honeycomb to fracture, allowing that sweet, sweet honey to flow and drip down through special channels, all without breaking the honeycomb. Then, the good stuff makes its way to a pipe leading out of the hive and into your mouth. Then the whole process can start again by twisting that lever back into place and returning the cells back to their position.
Just LOOK at that honey.
Beekeepers will be losing their minds about now. No suits? "If you know your bees, you can sit there in shorts and a t-shirt and it's safe, because you're not opening the hive and you're not banging around disturbing the bees," Anderson told Radio National. This is huge news for novice urban beekeepers, unknowing noobs who think they can chuck a hive in the backyard and have fresh honey without getting stung. The whole kit (without bees) will set you back $600, but it's a honey tap. A honey tap.
