Australia hive with honey flowing out. "Coniferous phytozont", "Rakurs", "Pinocid" - unique preparations for the health and beauty of coniferous plants

On February 14, 2015, a video was posted on the Internet with a project for a revolutionary new type of beehive, and on February 22, a fundraiser for the implementation of this project was launched. The result was stunning: the necessary funds were collected very quickly, but during the collection the amount was covered by more than 120 times. Today, this project is the absolute record holder of the Indiegogo crowdfunding site in terms of the speed of raising money.

Honey without the hassle

What is the revolutionary nature of Flow hives? The fact is that the most difficult work for a beekeeper is actually extracting honey. Traditional hive designs require the following steps:

First, the hive is opened. This already requires some strength: usually, to protect against bad weather, the covers of the hives are upholstered with iron, and the roof linings, magazines and additional cases are made of fairly thick and heavy boards.
The opened hive is fumigated from a smoker, and the removed frames are cleaned of bees with a sweeping brush (it should be noted that it is usually not possible to completely clean it: bees are extremely stubborn insects);
Frames in hands or in a special lockable box are transferred to the place of pumping work. A frame completely filled with honey, even for Langsroth-Ruth hives, weighs at least 2.5 - 3 kg, and the more common Dadan-Blatt frame weighs up to 5 kg. It is impossible to open the frames directly at the hive, so as not to excite the bees.
Then the sealed frames are opened and placed in a centrifuge-honey extractor. Honey is pumped out there, and the empty frames are either placed back into the hive for a new filling, or, if the pumping is the last one before winter, they are placed in storage.

The invention of Australian beekeepers from New South Wales Kedar and Stuart Anderson eliminates all these time-consuming steps. Their Flow frames allow you to simply substitute the container, and the honey from the hive will drain itself.

How does it work?

Flow consists of two vertical "semi-frames" made of BPA-free plastic. The contours of cells for honeycombs are outlined on them. The bees complete the cells, fill them with honey and seal the outside with wax lids. After that, it is enough for the beekeeper to use a special key, the half-frames are bred to the sides, the honey flows into the resulting void and fills the substituted container through a special tube. The beekeeper returns the key to its previous position, removes the tube - and the bees can start working again. They very quickly notice that the combs are empty, open them and refill them.

All operations with Flow frames are carried out through a special cover at the end of the hive, while there is no need to disturb the bees. This design makes it possible to dispense with the selection of honey without a smoker and a protective mask. In addition to the Flow frames, the hive also has frames of the usual design for brood and bee bread.

The Andersons, without undue modesty, consider their design the most significant invention in beekeeping since 1852, when the first examples of frame hives were created. The inventors claim that the Flow will not only eliminate the need for additional equipment, but will also make the extraction of honey almost imperceptible to both the bees and the neighbors of the amateur beekeeper.

For participants in the crowdfunding system, several options for buying frames are available - from $ 230 to $ 600, for which you will receive a ready-made hive without a bee colony. The inventors claim that according to their observations, the Flow frames are filled in the same way as ordinary ones. Up to 3 kg of honey can be drained from each, and this will take from 20 minutes to 2 hours. The time to fill the frame depends both on the strength of the bee colony and on the number of flowering honey plants around the apiary.

Estimates of beekeeping specialists

The innovation has been tested by beekeepers. They note the following pros and cons of the Flow framework.

minimal disturbance and injury for bees;
the ability to put the production of honey on stream;
ease of handling for the amateur beekeeper;
too deep compared to normal flow cells to prevent queens from laying eggs there, so there is no need to worry about the death of the brood during pumping;
with regular care during winter storage, there is no need to worry that the frame mechanism will stick together with propolis or become clogged with wax particles.

the very use of plastic in hives is no longer very environmentally friendly;
the use of Flow frames makes the beekeeper's approach too consumer-oriented, focused only on obtaining honey, and not on the needs of bees;
the use of frames of a new design is possible only in hot weather: thickened honey simply will not drain into the container;
Flow frames do not save you from disassembling the hive for inspection and treatment against ticks and other pests, so you won’t be able to completely do without a mask and a smoker;
even if the queen does not begin to worm within the framework of the Flow, who will explain to the bees that it is not necessary to put bee bread there?

Summing up, we can say that a full assessment of the invention of Australian beekeepers can only be given when the use of hives with frames of a new design becomes widespread, and beekeepers gain experience. So far, both the invention itself and the impressive crowdfunding rate look impressive.

See the video for more details, it is in English, but the main meaning is clear.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_pj4cz2VJM

February 14 appeared on the network video with a demonstration of a beehive project, to extract honey from which it is enough to substitute a container and wait until it is full. The video was very popular and gained a million views in two days. The crowdfunding campaign itself, in which the video called for participation, began on February 22, and its success turned out to be no less stunning: the project became Indiegogo's record holder for the speed of collecting the first and second million.

The idea was born on the north coast of New South Wales as a result of many bites through protective equipment and annoyance from dozens of crushed bees. Father and son Kedar and Stuart Anderson have been developing this project for a decade. The result is a plastic (BPA-free) Flow frame that consists of partially formed honeycombs.

The bees finish the comb with wax, lay the product and seal it. The Flow frame opens in the middle. Honey flows down from two rows of combs without the need to disturb the bee colony with a smoker. The combs are then closed again so that the bees can open the empty combs and continue collecting the product - the bees almost immediately notice that the combs are empty. The bees recycle some of the wax, which can improve productivity and honey production. The plexiglass window allows you to see when the honey is sealed and ready to be harvested.

Honey flows out of the Flow frames

The authors call their invention the most significant innovation in beekeeping since 1852, hinting that the Flow is on a par with the Langstroth hive. It is easy to see that the novelty not only saves time and makes the process painless for the bees, but also makes honey production a simple process accessible to amateurs who are not ready to buy expensive equipment. Bees often become aggressive when dismantling their hive. It is promised that with Flow, the beekeeper's neighbors will not notice the process of collecting honey.

There are several options available for backers: you can get either a pre-made Flow Box or multiple Flow Frames to incorporate into your own standard hive design. Prices start at $230 and can be found on the project page. For $600, the backer will receive a kit to assemble a completely finished hive, for which you only need to find bees to work.

To extract honey from which it is enough to substitute the container and wait until it is full. This project became the crowdfunding record for the speed of collecting the first and second million, and now the company is 8000% completed, and there are still 25 days left until the end of the fundraising.

The idea was born on the north coast of New South Wales as a result of many bites through protective equipment and annoyance from dozens of crushed bees. Father and son Cedar and Stuart Anderson have been developing this project for a decade. The result is a plastic (BPA-free) Flow frame that consists of partially formed honeycombs.

The bees complete the honeycomb with wax and then lay down the honey and seal it. The Flow frame opens in the middle. Honey flows down from two rows of combs without the need to disturb the bee colony with a smoker. The combs are then closed again so that the bees can open the empty combs and continue collecting the product - the bees almost immediately notice that the combs are empty. The bees recycle some of the wax, which can improve productivity and honey production.

The plexiglass window allows you to see when the honey is sealed and ready to be harvested.

There are several options available for project backers: you can get either a pre-built Flow Box or multiple Flow Frames to include in your own standard hive design. Prices start at $230 and can be found on the project page. For $600, the supporting project will receive a kit to assemble a complete hive that only needs to find bees to operate.

The crowdfunding campaign ended in April and raised $12 million from over 36k people! The media made a lot of noise about this product. Time will tell how successful this project will be and how it will affect the prosperity of the bees. But the idea is interesting anyway.

The article almost completely copies

In Australia, Cedar Anderson developed a beehive project, to extract honey from which it is enough to substitute a container and wait until it is full. This one became the crowdfunding champion in terms of the speed of collecting the first and second million and now the company is 8000% completed, and there are still 25 days left until the end of the fundraising.

And this is not surprising: extracting honey from hives is the most time-consuming and time-consuming work in beekeeping. Traditionally, this operation consists of many steps, the main ones are opening the hive, removing the bees, unsealing the combs with honey, and operating the centrifuge of the honey extractor. It is also possible for honey to run off without any help and after that a thermal effect. And the Australian project Flow offers a solution in which to extract honey, you do not need to open the hive and disturb the bees - you just need a container into which the finished product will drain.

The idea was born on the north coast of New South Wales as a result of many bites through protective equipment and annoyance from dozens of crushed bees. Father and son Kedar and Stuart Anderson have been developing this project for a decade. The result is a plastic (BPA-free) Flow frame that consists of partially formed honeycombs.

the honeycomb is finished with wax, the honey is put in and sealed. The Flow frame opens in the middle. Honey flows down from two rows of combs without the need to disturb the bee colony with a smoker. The combs are then closed again so that the bees can open the empty combs and continue collecting the product - the bees almost immediately notice that the combs are empty. The bees recycle some of the wax, which can improve productivity and honey production. The plexiglass window allows you to see when the honey is sealed and ready to be harvested.

The authors call their invention the most significant innovation in beekeeping since 1852, hinting that the Flow is on a par with the Langstroth hive. It is easy to see that the novelty not only saves time and makes the process painless for the bees, but also makes honey production a simple process accessible to amateurs who are not ready to buy expensive equipment. Bees often become aggressive when dismantling their hive. It is promised that with Flow, the beekeeper's neighbors will not notice the process of collecting honey.

There are several options available for backers: you can get either a pre-made Flow Box or multiple Flow Frames to incorporate into your own standard hive design. Prices start at $230 and can be found on the project page. For $600, the backer will receive a kit to assemble a completely finished hive, for which you only need to find bees to work.

The Australians claim, based on several years of observation, that the bees do not have any special preferences and fill the combs of Flow with the same frequency as the combs of ordinary frames. It is also stated that each frame brings up to 3 kg of honey, and the frequency of possible collection varies depending on the strength of the family and can range from a week during the peak season to a month. Honey needs twenty minutes to two hours to drain. It is still recommended to wear protective clothing. Of course, do not forget to leave some of the honey for the wintering of bees.

Of course, everyone is applying for amazing honeycombs. As of March 13, more than 13,000 people have already gathered. And the media made a lot of noise. Time will tell how successful this project will be and how it will affect the prosperity of the bees. But the idea is interesting anyway.

At first glance, beekeeping is a monstrously attractive business. Judge for yourself. Very little space is required to place an apiary - six acres of a garden plot will do - and a single hive can be placed anywhere at all, even on a balcony. In the vicinity of Moscow, bee families can be purchased for approximately 2.5 thousand rubles, and in many regions - even much cheaper. Ready-made hives, depending on the size and design, are sold at prices from 2 thousand rubles, but since they are structurally wooden boxes, if you have carpentry skills, you can make them yourself.

Unlike cows, chickens or rabbits, bees do not need to be fed or cleaned up, and they do all the work of producing a useful product completely independently.

Moreover, this product - honey - is tasty and healthy; stored indefinitely without refrigeration and conservation; popular with consumers. The retail price of honey in Moscow starts at about 300 rubles/kg and, depending on the variety, can be 1000 rubles/kg or even more. Every autumn, beekeepers from all over the country come to the annual honey fair in Moscow with their products, and they earn very good money.

Why, then, do not hives still stand on every household plot, and most people, ask them where the nearest apiary known to them is located, shrug their shoulders in bewilderment? The fact is that in fact the work of a beekeeper requires a number of very specific skills that border on art, and therefore difficult and even dangerous. A couple of times a year you need to do things that reliably scare away almost everyone who once thought about acquiring their own apiary.

Firstly, during swarming, when the bee family is divided into two, and part of the bees, together with the young queen, forms a swarm somewhere on a branch near the former home, the beekeeper has to put on a special protective suit and take off this swarm in order to instill it in new hive. But this is not so bad - the bees do not behave very aggressively, and this operation itself, strictly speaking, is not mandatory. If the young swarm is not picked up, it will fly away and settle somewhere in the hollow of a tree, as bees lived millions of years before us; the apiary will not receive an increase in livestock, - well, that's all. Things are much worse when “harvesting”.

In order to get the honey that the bees prepared for themselves, and which they are not disposed to share with anyone, it is necessary to open the hive, remove the frames with honeycombs from there, sweep the bees sitting there from them, print them with a special tool, extract the honey from there using a honey extractor, filter and unpack. Any attempt to invade their home is met with extremely aggressive bees, so beekeepers have to use special protective suits, smoke frames from a smokehouse and still behave very carefully in order to irritate the bees as little as possible.

Bee stings are not only very painful, they can be dangerous to health and even life, especially in the event of an allergic reaction. Every year, more than fifty people die from them in the world, and the culprits are not only the famous Africanized killer bees, but also the most common, “domestic” bees. And if you consider that, depending on the weather and the flowering schedule of the surrounding melliferous plants, this procedure sometimes has to be done several times a season, it is not surprising that those who are ready to put hives on their plots turn out to be very, very few.

However, such an antediluvian process of extracting honey turns out to be harmful and traumatic not only for beekeepers, but also for the bees themselves, many of which die in the process.

Australian beekeepers father and son Stuart and Cedar Anderson have been developing and testing a hive design for several years that would allow honey to be collected without interfering with the bees and without interfering with the life of the bee colony. As a result, they invented and patented a design called the Flow Hive (“stream hive”). Many enthusiasts call this invention the second revolution in the entire history of beekeeping (the invention of the modern frame hive in 1814 is considered the first).

The inventors took advantage of the fact that bees tend to save effort and willingly use ready-made empty combs, restoring and repairing them if necessary. The Andersons created a frame with almost finished honeycombs, which the bees willingly complete and fill with honey. When the time comes for the selection of honey, the beekeeper, with one turn of a special key, shifts the walls of the cells relative to each other, opening channels for the flow of honey. When all the honey drains into the substituted container, the key is turned in the opposite direction, the walls of the cells return to their original position and again stop into unfinished combs, ready to receive a new portion of honey.

At the same time, there is no need to open the hive and disturb the bees, which, it seems, do not even notice the operation being performed; people are quite calmly next to the hive during the honey collection; there is no need to use smokers, protective suits, honey extractors and other specialized equipment. In order to determine the moment when the combs are already full, and also not to disturb the frames with bee brood, a transparent window is arranged in the wall of the hive, allowing you to observe its inhabitants.

In February 2015, the Andersons began raising funds on the indiegogo crowdfunding platform, hoping to raise $70,000 to launch their invention into small-scale production.

In the first 5 minutes, about $40,000 has already been received; the amount collected for the entire period of the campaign exceeded $13 million, and the number of orders for miracle hives received from all over the world exceeded 20 thousand in the first two months alone.

As a result, instead of a small workshop, the inventors had to build a full-scale plant that meets the needs of beekeepers from all over the world - they have no competitors, since the Flow Hive design is patented, and no one else has the right to manufacture it.

It is possible to order only Flow frames - a minimum set of 3 pieces will cost $ 259 without shipping costs - or a fully prepared hive with 6 frames - it will cost $ 699. The swivel key and honey drain tubes are included in both cases. Pleasure, by Russian standards, is not cheap, because for more than 50 thousand rubles, which will have to be spent on Flow Hive, you can buy at least twenty traditional domestic hives.

Therefore, it is difficult to expect that the novelty will be widely adopted among experienced beekeepers, already accustomed to handling a smoker and a honey extractor. However, on the other hand, the novelty may attract many beginner amateur beekeepers or even those who would like to do this business professionally, but have so far refrained precisely from the difficulties associated with working on an open hive. Now, if there are sufficient free funds, anyone can put a beehive in their garden plot and enjoy their own honey without much hassle.

It should be noted that, in addition to numerous enthusiasm, the novelty has caused a number of skeptical reviews. In the forefront, of course, were traditional professional beekeepers, who said that Flow Hive kills the very spirit of beekeeping, excluding lively communication between man and bees and turning the hive into a honey extraction conveyor. However, it is this feature that attracts most beginner beekeepers to the invention - so these voices were hardly heard by anyone seriously.

A more serious objection is that the miracle hive is “sharpened” specifically for the production of honey, completely ignoring other traditional beekeeping products, such as wax, perga, royal jelly and propolis. However, with the exception of wax, everything else of the above is used mainly in medicine and cosmetology, and everyone needs honey - so the owner of a small apiary is also unlikely to bother with this - it looks very difficult for him to become a supplier of what some pharmaceutical giant.

The most important point, noted by critics, is that Flow Hive will only work if the honey in the honeycombs is liquid enough in consistency to flow by gravity. At low temperatures, especially relevant for Russia, or sugaring, honey thickens, making the honey selection procedure impossible. Therefore, before spending money on a novelty, it makes sense to get acquainted with the experience of experimental enthusiasts who have already managed to test it in practice in Russian conditions.

Finally, the question that arises for many who have become familiar with the Andersons' invention is it possible to launch independent production of their miracle hive, for example, in Russia? If we talk about the original design of the Flow Hive, then obviously not - it is patented, and no one has the right to produce it without a license from the copyright holders.

However, it is possible that among the Russian Kulibins there will be someone who will be able to invent a different design of honeycombs that allows you to collect honey without opening the hive and is not subject to patent restrictions. If at the same time the product turns out to be noticeably cheaper compared to the Andersons’ far from low-budget brainchild, then its production may turn out to be a very attractive and successful business.

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