(Duration: 10 minutes 47 seconds)

[Music]

[Red and blue logo revealed reading, ‘STEM 2021 on demand: Education for a rapidly changing world.’]

Stuart Anderson:

Cedar was keeping about 20 beehives and at that level of beekeeping, you don't have any machinery to help you lift the heavy boxes. Subtropical area we live in, it's hot and sweaty in the summer. The sweat wets your beesuit and the bees just sting straight through it. So one evening, after a day of hard work and getting stung and the frustrations of lugging all of this heavy gear into the honey processing shed, Cedar said to me, 'Dad, we've got to figure out a better way to do this. We've got to figure out a way to get honey out of a beehive without opening it.' And I thought, nah, that's impossible.

Cedar Anderson:

Hi, I'm Cedar Anderson.

Stuart Anderson:

My name's Stu, and I'm Cedar's father.

Cedar Anderson:

And together we invented the Flow Hive.

So the initial problem we were trying to solve is, how do we harvest the honey in a way that's both gentle on the bees without disturbing them and a lot easier for the beekeeper, in terms of not having to go through that long, labour intensive process, of getting in your bee suit, getting out your smoker, pulling apart the hive, taking those frames to a processing shed, using a leaf blower or brush, to brush off all those bees, cutting the wax, capping off the frames, spinning those frames in a centrifuge, filtering out all the wax and bee bits, cleaning up all the mess. If that's not enough hard work, those frames have to get back to the hives again, so a lot of hard work to get your honey, and I thought, there has to be an easier way. There has to be a better way where we can drain the honey straight out of the hive, into your jar, without opening it, without disturbing the bees.

Stuart Anderson:

Our quest to get honey out of a beehive was going to be impossible. If you, perhaps some of you know what a filing cabinet looks like, it's got all these files hanging in a drawer, each individual, and you can open and close the drawer, open the drawer and you get the file out. Well, what if I closed the door and locked it and said, now get a file out. That's the problem we were facing.

Cedar Anderson:

So the design objective was to get the honey out of the hive without opening it, without disturbing the bees, and making sure that it was a gentle process, so the bees could go about doing their business as we could watch the honey drain into your jar. Now that led to a whole bunch of problems to solve. One of them was how do you get honey out of a hexagon cell? So the bees make their beautiful hexagon pattern, and if you cut the capping off and you turn it over, the capping's the wax sheet the bees put over the honey when they've reduced the water content down enough, if you cut that off, the honey still doesn't drain out. If you cut the backing off it as well, it still doesn't drain out, even if you tip it over on its side.

So we tried all sorts of things. We tried to push out the honey with piston plungers, we tried to suck it out, we tried to make complex things inside the hive where capping moved away, and the back moved away, and the hive was on a tilt, and we failed. And we failed, and we failed.

So one morning I woke up and I thought, hang on a second. It doesn't have to be hexagon cells all the time. It could be a hexagon matrix when the bees are filling it with nectar and doing their process of making honey, and then change and pull apart into something else when it's time to drain the honey out. So I quickly got my pencil and I started scribbling things, and I wasn't even out of bed yet.

So I set about making this complex prototype, which had the use of an old car tire tube, and a suction diaphragm, and I would painstakingly cut with a craft knife all night to create a structure for the bees to then fill with honey. And while I was getting somewhere, and it was starting to show promise of working, my father after a few strong coffees went, "Hang on a second. How come we're going this way? How about we go this way?" And I suddenly knew exactly what he was talking about, rushed into the shed, and we started to make a brand new prototype, scrapping years and years of work.

So from there, we got some parts 3D printed, and that costs a lot. It was $2,000 for a very small area in the quality we wanted. And that was $2,000 that we didn't have. So how do we get from there, to not only film one box full of our flow frames, but multiple boxes in our own apiary and around the world to make sure we're going to test it thoroughly? So that meant we had to start injection moulding.

Stuart Anderson:

When we took our first prototypes and our hand drawings to the engineer to get them drawn up properly, and we said, we want to injection mould this, he just laughed at us. He said "That, a mould to make this is going to cost you half a million dollars or more." And we went whoa, whoa. We were pretty poor at the time. And so, just at that moment, leave the engineer's office back to the drawing board. How are we going to solve that problem of, to make a large mould, intricate mould is very, very expensive. And we realized, oh our frame actually is repetitive, it has the same pattern all the way through. We can make it in segments, that all fit together. And that then had a whole lot of other advantages, in that you could make it different lengths, because all around the world, people's beehives are different sizes. So suddenly it was adaptable to different sized boxes.

Creativity doesn't stop just when you've solved the main problem, there was endless little problems for us to solve. And sometimes, the solution that came out of solving those problems was even better than we imagined. So for example, we had the main frame and how it worked with the moving bits of honeycomb and so on, but it needed to be held by two end pieces, and Cedar thought, "well, what if they were clear?" And I thought, yeah, maybe they could join together to make a window, and then you could sort of see into the hive. I'm like, yeah, that's a good idea. Let's do that. And that was like an accidental part of the design in a way, it was just, and there were lots and lots of those.

Cedar Anderson:

So a moment I'll always remember is being there in the paddock, we've got our prototype in the hive and we've got a spanner on the outside of the beehive, and we're turning it, and honey just started pouring out into the jar, and we're there going, amazing! It's working, for the first time! And watching the honey just fill the jar was incredible. It's certainly after such a long time of trying and failing and trying and failing, it's a extremely memorable moment to see it worked for the first time.

So then we thought, we have the invention working and now it's time to take it to market, make it a part of the world. But we wanted to make sure the way we were doing that was doing the right thing for our planet, for our bees. So we went on another whole design loop, making sure that bees, when, if they're down moving cells, can't get legs or wings caught. Some people might not consider those things, but for us, that was really important that it was going to be great for the bees and also something that is going to inspire people in the world to take up beekeeping and look after the amazing little insects that make our world go round.

So here we are, five and a half years on, and we're so lucky to have a community all around the world. We have 75,000 orders, people using flow homes, 130 different countries, and enjoying harvesting honey and looking after bees in this new way. So then of course there's constant refining that needs to happen, from feedback from those that are using the product. So with our Flow Hive 2, one of the problems we wanted to solve was make it easier for the beekeepers to get the hive on the right tilt, to harvest your honey. So we put levels in the side of the hive, and we put adjustable legs on each corner. Then we improved the baseboard by putting a pest management trade that you can catch hive beetles in, or you can count your Varroa mites.

We also found that the wooden knobs after a while would tend to break off, so we changed to quality brass fixtures. We also found that when we get a wind of about 80 kilometres an hour coming up the slope here, the rooves of the hives would blow off. So we created these little wing screws that hold the roof onto the hive. So the joy of innovating is never finished. There's continual improvement, and since the beginning, we've made hundreds of small changes to continually make our product better.

Stuart Anderson:

One of the criticisms of the Flow Hive is that we've made beekeeping look too easy, and it's important to remember, you still need as a beekeeper to look after the health of your bees. It's really, really important. And to do that, you have to open the hive and you have to get used to having your hands in there. And you're going to see me smiling because I love having the bees crawling all over my hands, it's a wonderful feeling, but it's scary for the beginners. So one of the innovations we're working on is to make that process easier, to get into the parts of the hive that you need to inspect more easily than you can at the moment.

Cedar Anderson:

So every product that gets made, and every company that makes them has an impact on our world. And we want to make sure that our impact is as positive as it can be. So we're constantly looking at our materials and saying, how can we do better? How can we choose materials that are better for our world? So we're testing bio-plastics, we're testing recycled plastics, we're testing recycled wood fibre. In the end, it's our goal to get to a completely sustainable product.

[End of transcript]

(Duration: 6 minutes 43 seconds)

[Music]

Stu Anderson:

You know, in the future I think most businesses are going to just have to be sustainable or they'll get run out of town, you know, because we are realising now we can't do what we've been doing for decades. We can't imperil our whole earth and all of the creatures that live on it just because we want something instantly. We're going to have to take a bit more time and a bit more care. And businesses that don't do that are going to be fall by the wayside.

Cedar Anderson:

So sustainability in our lifetime has become front and centre. Every company now has to think about it. Every company is working on it. Most companies are really putting things into action to help our world in some way and that is a really important step for us as humans who want to go on living on this planet. Hi, I'm Cedar Anderson.

Stu Anderson:

My name's Stu, and I'm Cedar's father.

Cedar Anderson:

And together we invented the Flow Hive.

A home like this can pollinate 50 million flowers a day which is absolutely extraordinary and it's why humans have dragged the honeybee all around the world wherever they go because they are such extraordinary pollinators. Now, our agriculture and the honeybees are intertwined and without the honeybees, we can't produce enough food to support the human population as we know it. But it's not only the honeybees, it's all the other species of pollinators that are really important as well. And without pollination, the world as we know it, falls apart.

Stu Anderson:

Cedar and I have had to make decisions about how this company works and what we do and don't buy and the processes we're involved with.

Cedar Anderson:

It's been important to us to keep our product made in Australia, and that means supporting Australian businesses. It means we can keep an eye on the supply chain and it means that we can keep an eye on how our workers are being treated. And we're continually going on refinement loops which means looking at our product, looking at the materials, and going, "How can we do better?" "How can we phase out single use plastics and go from a little Ziploc bag containing the screws to a nice little cardboard box?" And so on and so on, until we have a truly sustainable product.

Stu Anderson:

So our wood is sourced from forests that have been managed sustainably.

Cedar Anderson:

We're using laser cutters to cut our wood into these beautiful shapes you see here. And we're installing a massive array of solar panels so that we can cut that wood with sunshine.

Stu Anderson:

There are a few different advantages to prioritising sustainability. One is, of course it feels good to me but our customers really appreciate it because the thing about it, if you've got a choice between two products and one you know is poisoning the world in one way or another, and the other one isn't which one are you going to choose? When we prioritise sustainability, we also have influence over other companies because we are saying to them, no this product that you're offering us isn't good enough. We want one that's sustainable. Find it for us. And for them at first, that can be a little bit puzzling. Why are they doing that? And after a while they get it, of course and they want to be on that journey as well. They want a good world for their children and their grandchildren. So it starts to make sense to others as well.

Cedar Anderson:

The shipping of hives and materials around the world has a carbon footprint, meaning that a lot of fuel is being burnt to do that. And we've committed to be carbon neutral by 2025 and that means we're either not producing that carbon dioxide into the atmosphere anymore or we are offsetting it by planting trees, et cetera.

Certifications are important to keep a company on track and one of those certifications we have is called BECOP not only because it's got B in the name and what BECOP stands for is doing business instead of plan A which is make as much money as you can and if you feel bad about it, donate a bit over here.

Let's do things that have a positive impact all the way through. And that's plan B. And it's not easy to get the certification but what it means is you're constantly looking at your policies, you're going through everything from what's on the table in your office to the complete infrastructure that keeps all of the cogs in your company going.

So becoming part of certification bodies that are doing active and great work in the world, which helps push you to make sure you are doing your best all the way through and continually improving. When we think about our marketing we think about how can we put forward a proposition that raises funds for habitat? How can we add that point? You're engaging your customer, make sure that we are putting forward the environmental proposition. So the way we've done that is through a variety of things.

One is we've created this upcycled pollinator house from Flow Hive off cuts with the idea, it's a fundraiser so 100% of profits goes to habitat regeneration and protection to look after our pollinators. From that, we created a micro grants programme where people can apply and we'll support them with what they're doing to support pollinators around the world.

And also donating to larger organisations that are doing amazing work in the world, one of which is a Bee Friendly Farming project where we provide seed to farmers to plant in order to support pollinators and also help them plot a path to phase out insecticides.

And we're now bringing that Bee Friendly Farming project from the USA to Australia so we can repeat the process here. In creating our brand that we call Flow, we want to make sure the environmental views and values we hold are embedded so deeply into the brand that even when we're dead and gone the brand goes on doing good things because it would be worthless without those views and values.

[End of transcript]

(Duration: 5 minutes 20 seconds)

[Music]

Cedar Anderson:

A hive like this can pollinate 50 million flowers a day. Which is absolutely extraordinary. And that's why humans have dragged the honeybee all around the world wherever they go because they are such extraordinary pollinators. Now, our agriculture and the honeybees are intertwined. And without the honeybees we can't produce enough food to support the human population as we know it. But it's not only the honeybees, it's all the other species of pollinators that are really important as well. And without pollination, the world as we know it falls apart. Hi, I'm Cedar Anderson.

Stuart Anderson:

My name's Stuart and I'm Cedar's father.

Cedar Anderson:

And together we invented the Flow Hive.

Stuart Anderson:

Insects are so important in our world because maybe up to half the foods that you eat is from plants that have to be pollinated. And of those half are getting pollinated by bees of different sorts. And honey bees are an important pollinator. So we need the insect pollinators, the bees, the wasps, the moths, some birds that pollinate, or our whole ecosystem would collapse. Not only would we not have our food, we wouldn't have the forests and we wouldn't have the meadows.

Cedar Anderson:

Humans have changed almost every surface of our earth and pollinators are under threat from two main things. One is our agriculture. Taking away vast amounts of habitat. And the other is insecticides. In order to support our pollinators, we need to put away the sprays and get out the habitat. And what I mean by that, is leaving wild spaces. Leaving habitat for our species to exist. And that means leaf mulch. That means mud for us some of our native bees to nest in. That means creating pollinator houses like this one. And we need to stop using insect killing insecticide. A billion litres a year of insecticide is sprayed onto our earth's surface. We need innovation. We need to work out a new way to produce our food that doesn't involve insecticide.

Stuart Anderson:

We've been using insecticides to control the pest insects in our orchards and in our acreages of wheat and so on. Those insecticides are filtered through the whole food chain and are really affecting bee's and bird's ability to thrive. So it might not kill 'em directly but it can really weaken them. So for example, there's an insecticide called neonicotinoid which has a lot of different bad effects on bees. But one of which is it knocks out their ability to navigate very well. So they might be able to find their way to the flowers but they can't find their way back up to the beehive. And so that beehive if it's too affected by that chemical, will die.

Diversity of plants and animals is so important when you have a complicated interconnected ecosystem. It's way, way stronger than just a simple two or three plant ecosystem. And so for example, with the almond orchards in Australia, huge, huge orchards that produce almonds for us. The growers now have learnt to just leave the weeds and to plant various flowering plants in amongst the trees rather than just leaving it bare. And now there's more forage for the bees. It keeps the bees and the other insects healthier and that's good for the almonds.

Another reason that insects are declining is that we are spreading various diseases and pathogens around the world with all of our air travel, sea freight, and so on. And so that animals and insects that never had to deal with particular fungus or particular pathogen, now have to deal with it because we're spreading them everywhere.

Cedar Anderson:

So the Flow Hive is great because it's encouraging people to keep bees. And bees are a window into the world that we completely depend on. But of course, there's more than our honey be to look after.

There's also the other 20,000 species of native bees in our world, and they need all sorts of different habitat. So what we decided to do was use the Flow Hive offcuts to create this little pollinator house. And a hundred percent of the profits raised from that go to habitat regeneration and protection. Some of these species of native bee only have a very small range of only 200 metres. So creating habitat in your backyard creates stepping stones for these species across the urban landscape, connecting corridors together If we create habitat, we can save some of these species from the brink of extinction.

[End of transcript]

(Duration: 10 minutes 17 seconds)

[Music]

Cedar Anderson:

People often ask me, "How did you maintain your enthusiasm to keep going when you've failed so many times?" And to me it wasn't a failure, it was learning. So each time you have a design that doesn't work you learn something and that helps you progress to the next prototype.

Stuart Anderson:

If you're working with someone else or maybe a team is to allow yourselves to be silly, absolutely stupid, come up with the most ridiculous ideas because that's loosening up your brain to actually find the idea that has something in it that's worthwhile and so, yeah, be silly, be stupid, come say stupid things and allow the other person to say stupid things, never used to put down.

Cedar Anderson:

Hi, I'm Cedar Anderson.

Stuart Anderson:

My name's Stu and I'm Cedar's father.

Cedar Anderson:

And together we invented the Flow Hive.

So I was harvesting honey in the conventional way and that meant taking all of the frames out of the hive, getting in your bee suit, getting your smoker, and then taking those frames to a processing shed and going through that long labor intensive process of harvesting honey in the conventional way. And I thought there has to be a better way. Perhaps we can get the honey straight out of the hive without disturbing the bees in a much easier way, simply turn a tap on the honey flows out of the hive into your jar and it's ready for the table. So that really sparked what turned out to be a decade long prototyping journey and my dad saw what I was doing and joined in.

Stuart Anderson:

We sort of clicked together, Cedar and I, in terms of loving to invent things. Even that evening we made up some inventions, ways that we might be able to do it. To my surprise, Cedar went away and started building them.

Cedar Anderson:

So we tried all sorts of things. We tried to push out the honey with piston plungers, we tried to suck it out, we tried to make complex things inside the hive where capping moved away and the back moved away and the hive was on a tilt and we failed and we failed and we failed.

Stuart Anderson:

We'd hit a wall again and again, because our latest experiment didn't work and then we'd have another idea and we sorta knew that idea wasn't gonna work, but we built it anyway because we knew we would learn. And it didn't work, even though there's a little part of us hoping it would, but it didn't, of course it didn't. But we learned about the quality of plastics or the way honey flows and doesn't flow. Every time we tried something, we learned a little bit more.

Cedar Anderson:

So one morning I woke up and I thought, hang on a second, it doesn't have to be hexagon cells all the time. It could be a hexagon matrix when the bees are filling it with nectar and doing their process of making honey, and then change and pull apart into something else when it's time to drain the honey out. So I quickly got my pencil and I started scribbling things and I wasn't even out of bed yet. So that was the first light bulb moment.

So I set about making this complex prototype, which had the use of an old car tire tube and a suction diaphragm and I would painstakingly cut with a craft knife all night to create a structure for the bees to then fill with honey. And while I was getting somewhere and it was starting to show promise of working, my father after a few strong coffees, went, "Hang on a second, how come we're going this way? How about we'd go this way?" And I suddenly knew exactly what he was talking about. I rushed into the shed and we started to make a brand new prototype, scrapping years and years of work. So from there we got some parts 3D printed and that costs a lot. It was $2,000 for a very small area in the quality we wanted and that was $2,000 that we didn't have. So then we were after so many failures in the paddock, we've got a beehive, we've got our 3D printed parts inside, we've turned a spanner on the outside and the honey's just pouring out. It was incredible to see it for the first time.

Stuart Anderson:

We'd realized we could do it. We were so excited and it's such a journey, it's intoxicating, you know, solving all these problems one by one and getting to the point where you know you can make it work, but you've gotta pause. You've gotta think, well, okay I've achieved my goal of being able to do this, get honey out of a hive without opening it, but is it a good idea for the world? Is it gonna help, really help the bees? Will it help beekeepers? Will it help our world in general in all of the various problems that are facing us? For me that was a really, really important question because the next stage is a lot of work, getting an invention to commercial. And so you've got to decide, is this really a good idea? Something that I'll feel passionate about as we go ahead. Just, just making money from it, that's not a good enough reason. It's got to have purpose and be worthwhile.

Cedar Anderson:

So how do we get from there to not only filling one box full of our flow frames, but multiple boxes in our own apery and around the world to make sure we're going to test it thoroughly. So then we had to redesign in a way that allowed us to make injection molding tooling that wouldn't cost the world. And how do we choose materials that are going to be recyclable, that are going to be sustainable, and how do we make it so that we can keep it made in Australia? So we wanted our product to be good for the world, good for the bees, good for the beekeepers and inspiring for people so that they would take up beekeeping.

Stuart Anderson:

Yeah, the funny thing was that back then we were thinking more commercial beekeepers, we weren't thinking amateurs. We were thinking this would help commercial beekeepers. And then we started to realize it was gonna help commercial beekeepers who had wrecked their backs, you know, lifting heavy boxes. And then from there we realized, oh, that's means people that aren't as strong can actually keep bees now and, you know, we started to realize, oh, this is opening up things. Hmm, that's a good enough reason to keep going.

Cedar Anderson:

So then it was a choice of how do we take our invention to market? Obviously it needs funds to do that. You have to create the injection molding tooling, set up factories, set up marketing, all of that needs to happen.

Stuart Anderson:

It was new to us, like who are angel investors? How do they work? What about banks? What about if you allow another partner into your business, what does that mean? And Cedar had heard about this crowdfunding, what was that about? You know, so we had a lot of study to do and we consulted a lot of people and we talked to other inventors, some incredible stories of invention. And some of them were about inventors that had lost control of their invention, their baby, you know, and felt that it didn't work, not because it wasn't a good invention, but because the investors squashed it in one way or another. So we started getting a bit scared of going to banks and investors. We focused ourselves on the crowdfunding.

Cedar Anderson:

So we even went to crowdfunding workshops to teach us how to do a crowdfunding campaign. And they talked about our idea and said, "It won't work, crowdfunding's for widgets and gizmos." And I walked out and went, "Aah stuff that, gonna do it anyway." So with the help of my sister's video talent we put together a small teaser video, which basically said here's what we've invented, that honey came out of that hive there without opening it, without disturbing the bees. If you wanna know more, put your email in here. And that video got a million views in the first 30 hours and life hasn't been the same since. A week later we had 70,000 emails from people wanting to know more. And when we pressed go on our crowdfunding campaign, we actually crashed Indiegogo several times from the amount of people pressing refresh, it was incredible. We needed $70,000 in order to make our first injection molding tooling and start making our product. And we reached that target in seven minutes and that was unbelievable. Two hours later, we were the fastest crowdfunding campaign in the world to reach $1,000,000. Then it just went on and on breaking records.

Stuart Anderson:

Crowdfunding was going so well, millions of dollars was coming in and Cedar was riding high and I was going, "Stop, stop, this is really scary," because what was happening, yes, that money was coming in but every dollar was an obligation. Every time someone pledged to us we were going to have to send them a beehive, and there was 130 different countries and in the end over 20,000 hives to deliver around the world and we'd promised it by Christmas, which was nine months away, just crazy.

Cedar Anderson:

Eight weeks later, we had 12.2 million US dollars in pre-orders of our Flow Hive. So here we are five and a half years on and we're so lucky to have a community all around the world. We have 75,000 orders. People using flow hives in a 130 different countries and enjoying harvesting honey and looking after bees in this new way. Most of the things we'll be using in 50 years time, haven't been invented yet. And it's extremely clear that we have problems in our world and those problems need solving by good ideas and people like you and me putting them into action.

[End of transcript]