Partnering with Australian charity, Wheen Bee Foundation, the Flow team have assisted in founding the Bee Friendly Farming Programme – a farmer-focused initiative which encourages crop growers to protect our most precious natural helpers. While the project has flourished as a tasty way for people looking to get hands-on experience with beekeeping in their own gardens – the Flow Hive community has 75,000 members worldwide – the wider implications for farming are buzzing with potential. The insects remain between the frames throughout the whole process, so nobody gets stung and potential bee-crushing is kept to a bare minimum! A key is then inserted to open up the cells, allowing the contents to flow down through a tube and straight into a jar. The BPA-free frames have a split-cell mechanism, which the bees plug with wax and fill with honey. The Flow Hive has been developed to reduce stress both for bees and beekeepers. Fewer bees means poorer pollination, and agricultural crop yields suffer as a result. Also, no matter how careful the handler, the extraction and re-installation of the frames inevitably results in crushed members of the hive. This can be a traumatic experience for the insects, and to keep them calm keepers must smoke the hive in order to mask the distress pheromones the bees release. A typical hive must be opened up in order to scrape honey from the honeycomb cell frames inside. This population crash isn’t helped by the fact that traditional methods of harvesting honey can be damaging to the bees producing it. “Pollinators are essential to life as we know it,” explains Stu, noting that our fuzzy friends are the backbone of agricultural crop production – the fruits and vegetables we eat, along with livestock feed – “but global insect populations are crashing at an alarming rate.” But what if there’s a way to take the sting out of apiculture? Meet the Australian start-up bringing beekeeping to the masses.įlow began as father-and-son team Stu and Cedar Anderson’s plan to create a happier home for their honey bees. Time and again we hear the typical excuses as to why people don’t keep bees: they don’t have the time, they live in a small apartment, they’re terrified of being swamped by an angry cloud of tiny, six-legged honey-farmers, and so on. project_description Australian start-up Flow is bringing beekeeping to the masses with their Flow Hive that reduces stress both for bees and keepers, and promotes a more pro-pollinator approach to farming.project_headline Taking the sting out of apiculture. project_leader Cedar Anderson and Stu Anderson, co-founders.project_website_title_3 Flow on Instagram.project_website_title_2 Flow website (EU).project_website_title_1 Flow website (US).
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