Cedar Anderson - Co-founder of Flow Hive
A third-generation apiarist Cedar Anderson was keeping bees at the age of six and - even then - he thought ‘there has to be a better way’.
He’d seen his brother get stung, the bees get crushed, and a honey harvest take an entire week.
Having grown up on a bushland “intentional community” in the Rainbow Region of NSW, Australia, Cedar didn’t have a TV growing up. Instead, he spent his time tinkering and coming up with crazy inventions to delight his friends and family. As an adult, work revolved around his other consuming passion as a paragliding instructor and capturing aerial footage for Greenpeace.
The inventor instinct stuck in the decades to come, and he and his father Stuart spent more than ten years trying to figure out a better way to harvest honey.
Sitting in their shed one day, Stuart put his hands into the shape of a honeycomb cell and moved them to show how a cell could be split horizontally.
The pair worked on designs and prototypes, and came up with Flow Hive, which breaks the honeycomb cells and allows the honey to drain.
In February 2015 they decided to take it to market, but rather than seeking investments, they launched a crowdfunding campaign. Within 15 minutes they had raised $250,000 and by the end of the campaign they had US$12.2 million in preorders, which broke Indiegogo’s funding record.
The Flow Hive has been recognised for its unique innovation; winning the Good Design Australia Product of the Year Award 2016, the D&AD White Pencil Award for Urban Living 2016, the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award 2017 and Silver at the World Beekeeping Awards 2017. Since its launch in 2015, the Flow Hive has inspired thousands of new beekeepers around the world with over 51,000 hives in 130 countries and has inspired many to look after our important honey bees which are so vital to our natural world we all completely depend on.
Hear from Cedar at Sunrise Island this September.