in a world brimming with complexity few creatures
embody harmony like the honeybee with tireless
precision she dances from bloom to bloom each
motion guided by millennia upon millennia of
instinct each act in service to the whole and
then There are the beekeepers, watchful stewards
of this ancient symbiosis. Part agriscientist,
part poet, they move along their hives with the
efficiency of mow, levy and curly, tending to
the bees' needs as best they can comprehend,
and with the infrequency of a waterfall in the
Sahara, sometimes running off flapping and flailing
like a penguin on a hot sidewalk. This is their
journey. A lot of us complain about some of the
difficulties in beekeeping. Others put their
brains together and do something about it. I'm
referring specifically to all of the heavy lifting.
And frankly, if you're like me, I admit I don't
do my varroa washes as often as I should because
it's so difficult lifting the honey supers, maybe
three of them at 60 pounds each, finding somewhere
to put them, eventually putting them back on.
There has got to be a better way and our guest
today and his father have figured that one out.
First this week's headline from Arizona about
a wild and crazy beekeeping story that unfortunately
turned tragic. A pedestrian was fatally struck
after a swarm of bees escaped their container
and began stinging the driver that was transporting
them. This happened on November 8th in Mesa Arizona
in the morning and according to authorities the
driver was in the process of transporting a swarm
of bees when they began to escape their container.
The bees quickly spread throughout the cab of
the transport vehicle and began aggressively
stinging the driver. Sadly, while suffering multiple
stings, the driver lost control of the vehicle
and struck a pedestrian before crashing into
a pole. Unfortunately the pedestrian lost their
life as a result of the accident. The driver
was taken to the hospital following the crash
and treated for minor injuries. I'm not quite
sure what to do with this. I'm just going to
let it sit for a minute with a reminder for all
of us to think safety first in every aspect of
our beekeeping. On a much lighter note, research
into the mental well -being impact of being connected
with bees is also taking flight. A recent Irish
study linked caring for bees with stress reduction,
emotional regulation, social correctedness, and
a sense of purpose. An Italian study found that
it fosters positive emotions, psychological flow
and feelings of amazement. Bees are known for
batting well above their weight when it comes
to supporting human well -being. You know, we
thank them for sustaining our food supply, maintaining
biodiversity and producing ingredients that are
used in skin care, medicine and elsewhere. Now,
it seems that they may also hold a key to our
emotional wellness as a growing number of people
are discovering that caring for bees is a powerful
way to nurture their inner calm. While specific
beekeeping studies on mental health are still
emerging, psychologist Tosh Balakis says the
skills involved in caring for bees such as attention
restoration, gentle physical movement, and sensory
grounding align strongly with what's already
known to work well for mental health. What makes
it so fascinating is that it's a blend of science
and soul says Belakis. We know from environmental
and occupational psychology that engaging in
structured purposeful outdoor activities can
lower stress hormones and improve mood regulation.
Time spent in nature combined with caring for
another living thing boosts well -being. Now
for today's guest, we're heading down under to
the east coast of Australia for a discussion
with Cedar Anderson, co -founder of Flow Hive.
Welcome, welcome to Be Love, Be Keeping everybody.
And we're going a long ways. We're going clear
down under to meet with Cedar Anderson today.
Cedar, how are you? Thank you very much for having
me Eric and I'm great it's a beautiful sunny
day here good for beekeeping. Why don't you let
everybody know where in Australia are you? So
we're in Byron Bay which is a little town on
the east coast of Australia and it's a subtropical
region which means the bees forage all year round
and sometimes in winter we get some really good
honey flows too depending on the weather. What
kinds of things do they forage on? So in the
wintertime they'll be foraging on the paper bark
which the rains set off and then in the springtime
you've got a whole lot of things flowering and
you get really light honeys from the forest and
also from the farmland with the macadamia trees
and then the rest of the year we tend to get
the darker honeys and especially through the
winter you get honeys that are almost black so
we've got the range from almost black through
to almost clear. It's pretty neat. It's cool.
Well, most of us beekeepers, we tend to whine
and complain about things like, oh man, that
super weighs 80 pounds. I don't want to have
to pick that thing up or extracting is such a
big hassle. You and your father are people that
just did something about it instead of complaining
about it. Tell us who you are. Tell us what you
guys have come up with. So I used to keep bees
in the conventional way, selling honey to the
local shops by the bucket full. And it was through
that I went, hang on, this is a real pain. harvesting
in the conventional way you know how it goes
you've got the extraction room which was the
shed I lived in you got a big sticky mess you've
got the centrifuge you've got the sieving buckets
the decapping knives the stainless steel benches
and a whole stack of sticky boxes getting ants
and wax moths and so on right a normal kind of
conventional setup I thought hang on a second
Isn't there a better way to do this? Can't we
just tap the honey straight out of the hive?
And that thought's what sparked a decade long
journey with my father and I inventing the Flow
Hive. Now we simply, and I still get mesmerized
by watching it, you turn the handle on the hive
and the honey flows straight out, straight into
your jars, bypassing that whole extracting room.
So it's like your extraction room built right
into your hive, if you like. It's kind of not.
necessarily apples for apples either because
a single flow hive box can take the place of
multiple sticky boxes if you like because you
can keep tapping the honey out and storing it
in jars on the shelf instead of boxes on the
hive to batch harvest. Well that makes sense
so so like a lot of us we're really proud of
showing our Gee, look at my hives with five supers
on top. So they're 10 feet tall, which is completely
impractical and things like that. In some areas,
how often do people do you call it tapping the
hive? Yeah, we call it harvesting. I mean, the
conventional term is robbing, but we tend to
call it harvesting. And that sort of delineates
between the robbing behavior of bees and humans
in a way. So we call it harvesting the hive.
Yeah, now a process of just walking out to the
hives with your jars and ready to go. One of
the things that we really didn't set out to invent
but has become an amazing kind of side benefit
is the way you can isolate different flavors
from the single hive because if you imagine the
bees are filling up the frames as they go from
the center, slowly moving out, then you get a
variety of honeys in each frame. And then you
start harvesting a couple of those and they'll
fill it with whatever's flowering right now.
So you get this checkerboarding and these beautiful
different flavors and colors coming out of a
single hive, which I find fascinating. I mean,
I really love honey. So to be able to taste those
differences and isolate those differences is
a real benefit. Well, I would guess especially
in a place like where you are, where you have
different things. flowering different nectar
flows what half a dozen or so different ones
during the year? Yeah I mean there'd be hundreds
of different flowers flowering but there's a
few key ones that really do go and you can get
more of a monofloral flavor one of them is the
paperbark another one that we get in in the springtime
is that the Goya or Wild Quince is a nicer name
for it but that's a really blow your taste buds
off really light colored honey and the Melaleuca
on the other hand Bababark is a is a almost burnt
toffee darker honey. Well and most of us even
though we have various flows some of the things
you mentioned earlier it's such a hassle harvesting
honey. Just the cleanup alone let alone pulling
frames Getting wax cappings off all that kind
of stuff that we only want to do it once or twice
a year So we end up with what we call wild flower
honey because it's just a mixture of everything
But yeah, that would be fun to be able to say
okay You know this month we have these fruit
trees flowering and I'd like to taste the honey
from those and then next month It's something
else. I'd like to taste that makes sense And
there's a beautiful little feature where you
can actually just harvest part of a frames if
you're just curious and you can even do that
even before it's ripe if you want to just crack
the last little cell line and taste that flavor
coming in and to me that really helps me connect
what's flowering as to what honey is being produced
and be able to work out which flowers are determining
which flavor. Let's talk about Flow Hive for
a minute. Specifically, I like the business side
of things and you guys did a crowdfunding thing
that everybody saw. I mean everybody, even whether
you were a beekeeper or not. So congrats on that
because that is not an easy thing to do. To you
and your dad, big congratulations on that. Give
me just a rough idea. I don't need any sacred
information, but about how many Flow Hives have
you sold? So it's upwards of 150 ,000 now to
130 different countries in the world. The U .S.
is a very popular place for flow hives, as well
as Australia. It's been this, I mean, real joy
to have a global community. And, you know, I
still pinch myself, of course, amazing success
for our invention. But this global community
that sprung up is Something that we've learnt
so much from and every week I spend an hour head
to camera answering questions from all over the
world. It's fascinating to hear them coming in
from all corners of the globe and have that rich
knowledge of beekeeping being shared in a global
way. Who do you find mostly are your typical
buyers? Is it beginners? Who is it? So we get
about half beginners and half existing beekeepers
and we don't get the large -scale commercial
beekeepers we tend to get the small -scale what
we call boutique honey producers where you've
just got 30 or 40 hives in your yard and you're
jarring up your honey and selling it to the local
shops and so on. What we find is clever beekeepers
We'll actually market the fact that a single
frame honey has this higher flavor retention
which has been proven by universities and things
because the honey hasn't been processed by a
whole lot of machinery, it hasn't been mixed
with 30 other hives' honeys and so on. So you
do get this flavor profile really present. Clever
Boutique commercial beekeepers are going direct
to jar by passing the Production, shed, all of
the decapping line, all of that. And even the
bottling machine, they're just bottling it right
up at the hives and then able to tell that story
and not only harvest in an easier way, but also
fetch a much higher price for their honey. I
don't have one of your Flow Hives yet. I know
some people that do that absolutely love them.
I also know some people that naively bought them.
Okay and I'm sure you've heard this and this
is no slam on you. This is probably a slam on
people not doing their research but they saw
the stuff from your crowdfunding, bought a Flow
Hive, set it up and then in the backyard and
then went okay where's the bees and where's my
honey and they didn't realize they had to not
only by bees, but they had to learn how to be
a beekeeper. And I think that's something that
we need to talk about here, is the flow hive
doesn't do all your beekeeping for you. There's
still a lot that you have to learn. Would you
address that? Absolutely, yes. Like any bee hive,
the bees still need the same care they've always
had, and that is different in different regions.
So local knowledge is good to know what... level
of intervention or care you need to give your
hive. The Flow Hive invention itself is specific
to the honey harvesting and although we've built
more features into the Flow Hive to assist your
beekeeping bit, the Flow Hive invention with
our Flow Frames is basically the extraction room
built into the hive and as far as the bees looking
after them it's much the same as it's always
been. We get a wide variety from people that
get totally fanatical about their bees and become
amazing beekeepers. And like you say, beekeepers
that start and actually don't want to put in
the effort to look after their bees. And I think
that's the same across any kind of beekeeping
or hobby pursuit. You get the people that just
jump in and don't want to do the learning. You
get other people that really do. We did about
it because that became very apparent early on.
I mean, when we did our crowdfunding, we were
expecting existing beekeepers to buy our flow
frames. What we found is that most people wanted
the whole kit and caboodle, the hive, and at
least half of them were new to beekeeping at
that moment. So all of a sudden, we realized
that we needed to educate. And out of the gate,
we started creating lots of online training material.
to address the new beekeeper and what they needed
to know and what they needed to learn. And we've
been doing that ever since, creating an enormous
amount of training material. Are you a beekeeper
who loves sharing tips, asking questions, and
showing off your latest honey haul? Then join
The Hive, introducing the Man Lake beekeeping
community on Facebook, your new go -to for everything
honey bees. Whether you're struggling with mites,
trying a new winterization method, or just need
to know what that weird thing on your frame is,
our group is a supportive, spam -free zone for
beginners and pros alike. Stop scrolling through
endless forums and connect directly with beekeepers
and the professionals at Man Lake in one buzzing
place. We'll put a link to it down in the show
notes. Just click over and join up. I also jump
in front of the camera an hour still every week.
answering questions to anybody who wants to ask.
On top of that we put a dedicated online training
course at the beekeeper .org with experts from
all over the world that have tuned in so it's
not only our knowledge but a lot of experts from
the USA and Europe and so on. That course gets
rave reviews and is also an amazing fundraiser
for the bees and we're really proud to support
a whole lot of initiatives. from funds raised
from the beekeeper .org. So education is super
key to our mission, if you like. We're going
to put your website down on the show notes. And
if you have a special link to that once a week,
one hour thing, I want to go on there and think
up a really hard question for you. Okay. Please
do, please. You probably know a hundred times
more than I do, so I can't stump you, but it'd
be fun to try. I'm sure there's some things that
are specific to your region that we don't have,
but yeah, there's certainly a lot of great questions
that come in. By the way, one of the things that
I love is that you and all your videos and the
people whose flow hives I've seen tend to leave
a natural wood look. I assume you're using varnish
or oil or something to preserve that wood. I
absolutely love that. That just is a beautiful
thing. I have one that is that is a wax dipped
and so it looks like it's varnished of regular
Langstroth hive and I just love the look of them.
It is a beautiful thing to have that natural
wood look and You know and I think people also
like the aesthetic of the peaked roof and it
just looks beautiful in in your yard Yeah, definitely.
All right. Let's talk seasonality just a little
bit If I have a flow hive and I live in a warm
place like where you are Do I leave that flow?
I'm sorry. Do we call it box? Yeah, you can call
it a super Do we leave the flow super on all
year? And if I'm in a cold climate, am I taking
that off in the winter? So it's common, as you
know, in those places that get a long, cold winter
to reduce the size of the hive to make it a bit
easier on the colony. But what you're doing is
you're also juggling honey stores to survive
through that time. And if you're way up north,
then you may find you need quite a lot of honey
stores for your bees to survive. So most people
are feeding them up if they need to prior to
the long winter. Whether you take the flow super
off will depend on I guess how big your hive
is already. If you have just a single brood box
and a single super on, you might decide to leave
it on. so the bees can forage on the remaining
honey that's left in it and stay alive during
the winter. However if you're going to do that
you should remove the queen excluder so that
your queen isn't left behind as that cluster
moves up and consumes the remaining stores in
your flow frames. Now the flow frames won't be
an issue in a really cold winter, they'll be
completely fine so you can choose to leave them
on. However, a lot of beekeepers do take the
flow super off in those regions because they
might have two boxes underneath that and they
decide to reduce it to two box colony. So you've
got maybe a double brood or you might have a
brood box and just an ideal on top of it to survive
the winter. Local knowledge is key, but you can
configure it any way you like. There's no right
or wrong. What we find in those really cold regions
is that people like perhaps a single brood box
and I might go for the 10 frame size which we
call the Flow 7 because flow frames are a bit
wider. Then an Ideal on top of that and then
perhaps a Super on top of that. So the colder
regions can use an Ideal box as a honey barrier
and therefore not need an excluder. Then you
might decide to remove the Flow Super for winter
and just leave them with the Ideal. and the brood.
So that becomes a popular configuration in the
colder areas as well. I think it'd be a good
idea to get in touch with beekeepers in your
area already using Flow Hives, see what's working
for them, connect with that group, totally makes
sense. I was recently at Appamondia over in Copenhagen
and happened to walk by your booth and saw your
new Superlifter. And I went, oh god, that thing
is pretty cool. Would you tell everybody what
that is? I know it's a little bit hard to explain,
so maybe just tell us what it does and we'll
figure out how to get some video in. Yeah, so
my father and I set our minds to... Solving the
next big thing as we see it in beekeeping, and
that's lifting the heavy boxes. No one likes
it. It's a hard job. It's something that's prohibitive
for going and looking after your colonies. You
know, you've got to get into that bottom box.
You've got to lift potentially a number of supers
off. And we thought, hang on. Can't we just make
something simple here? But it was surprisingly
hard to come up with something simple, something
that would fit in a bag and something that would
be easily transferable from hive to hive. So
we riddled away for years with draw sliders,
with things like, I don't know if you know the
AZ hives that have the frames that pull out,
contraptions like that, ones that had the box
below. the top ones would jack up and the box
below would then slide out all sorts of quite
complex contraptions and we thought well let's
see if we can come up with a simple thing we
can attach to the hives as they are. So that
led us to where we ended up with something we
walk up to the hive with and in 10 seconds you
can have the hive open like a box if you like
with the top box or there might be two supers
on top laden with honey and you can then easily
tip them over and begin beekeeping and the contraption
itself that we call a superlifter is also a stand
for those boxes and I've actually there's one
behind me here you can see now I might have to
pull the headphones out for a second this is
the superlifter so it fits in a little bag like
that and folds up into a very neat little thing
that you can just move from hive to hive. Now,
I can just walk up to my hive and the only modification
you need to make to a Flow Hive or a conventional
Langstock hive is these stronger low point screws,
if you like. And what that does is allow you
then connect on your lifter, like this, just
by folding the upper arms onto the low point
screws then you can lift this like it's a handle
if you like and roll it around so I still haven't
really bent down but what I've got there is now
a hive that's ready to open like a box right
and that saves an incredible amount of weight
and you're straight into your brood nest And
what people are really enjoying is that putting
the box back on is often, you know, you're waddling
up with this big heavy box and you usually just
have to drop it. There's no other way around
it. And that's a bit of, you know, it's hard
to then get it in line. You've crashed a whole
bunch of bees, but you've got this beautiful
controlled method where the only place it's landing
is here. So that's the only spot you need to
sweep bees out of the way. And then if we come
back to this side, you've got as slow as you
like, gentle closure here where we can use a
bee brush or some smoke to get the bees out of
the way as we close it. And that just gives you
this perfect landing, if you like. And then you're
onto your next hive like that. So a couple other
questions that I had. You mentioned you can use
that with Langstroth or Flow Hive. Can we use
it with eight? or 10 frame supers? Yes absolutely
8 or 10 frames you can even mix up ideal boxes
in the configuration as well. So and we can use
it with deeps mediums whatever we can come up
with okay. Yes you can it's just about configuring
your screw position your load point screws in
the right place for the lifter to then lift and
you can also one added thing we have is for when
you've got a really heavy few boxes on top then
we have some extension handles that clip on which
give you an even easier lift again. And if you've
got a stack of hives usually the propolis of
the bees glue them together but we also have
some nice brass toggle latches to really hold
those boxes together to make sure they don't
come apart if you're then tipping them over.
And one really common question we get, right,
is how come the honey doesn't come out? It's
because we're tipping it in the plane of the
frame. So if you like the cells are just moving
from facing this way where the bees are depositing
honey, turning around that 90 degrees. So you
don't get any nectar spilling out as you roll
that box over. Now a beginner might also think,
well, wait a minute. you're taking that box,
you're full of bees, you're turning it up 90
degrees. Do the bees care? Doesn't that bother
them? And I can tell you, no, it does not bother
them. In fact, it's a good thing to do that sometimes
because you want to see underneath those frames
you want to see if any queen cells are being
developed under there there may be honey propolis
whatever sticking everything together so from
time to time it's actually a good thing to do
so you can clean that stuff up if you need to
absolutely yeah and the way the contraption makes
a nice little stand is great and we don't find
we ever get the bees crossing between the brood
box and the super so we haven't found any issues
where the queen's moving from one to the other
because we've put a little distance across the
brackets from your brood box to your supers cedar
you like everybody that comes on the show gets
the opportunity to tell a fun wild and crazy
beekeeping story have you thought of anything
i warned you a little earlier i've got plenty
of them actually it can be more than one Let's
start with one related to the superlifter and
that's my father and I were doing all sorts of
experiments and we had we had contraptions on
hives and we're at my place and the hives are
on a slope I've got 40 hives under a row of trees,
but it's sloped there. This is going back six
years ago. So we're working on this lifter for
a long time actually and we had two 10 frame
boxes totally laden with honey, a gabled roof
on top full of honey as well. So a lot of weight
and our prototype lifter actually gave way. So
you can imagine what happened next. All hell
broke loose and the hive itself fell down, ripped
our contraption apart and continued to roll down
the hill. Oh man, I need video of that. And this
is when you really wish you had a proper bee
suit on. The bees did not like that and I kept
pretty wild bees at the time as well. That was
definitely a bit of an inventing moment going
wrong. So what did you learn from it to improve
from that prototype to the next one? Yes, we
learnt that we needed something that was a stronger
mounting point onto the hub, which is why we
came up with these load point screws, which are
really quite strong and they're longer than normal
screws as well, so they go deep into the timber,
enabling a much stronger attachment point. The
lifter itself, it's solid steel, right? It is,
it's aluminium, so it's an all metal construction.
When you've got that thing set up right you can
jump on it and it's solid. The time when you
can get into issues is if you have not attached
your brackets properly and you go to do a lift
with one side disconnected so watch out for that.
Make sure you set it up right. All right Cedar
it's been a ton of fun. I need to get down to
Australia sometime. We had somebody on the show
recently from Kangaroo Island and he was really
entertaining too and it'd be fun to go and see
some of these sites down under. Hey, last thing,
tell us what is it about honey bees and beekeeping
that you love? So for me it's this fascinating
learning journey that never stops. You think
you know everything when you start out but in
actual fact it's the other way around. The more
you learn, the more there is to learn. So that
keeps you pretty engaged all the way and as you
build more knowledge you have more questions.
So it's this beautiful space of curiosity and
a never -ending learning journey that keeps going
and I'm learning so much from our amazing global
community about bees in every part of the world.
The other big thing is I really like the way
they're intertwined with us as humans and the
way that we need enough bees to do our pollination.
Otherwise we lose a lot of food off our supermarket
shelves. Humans have taken the honeybee wherever
they've gone because they're such extreme little
pollinators. In fact a single hive could pollinate
50 million flowers in a day and that's just unbelievable.
We don't have anything else to replace that function.
So it's really important to have enough beekeepers
to look after enough bees to keep our whole system
going. So that's a really rewarding thing is
to be part of that and be part of a global community
doing a function that's so integral to pollination,
not only of our agricultural pursuits, but beyond
that, to the very matrix of life that we completely
depend on. Wow, beautiful. All right. Cedar Anderson,
Flow Hive, thank you a ton for being with me
today. Thank you very much for having me, Eric.
Thanks for joining us on Be Love Beekeeping presented
by Man Lake. If you like this content, I hope
you'll share it with a friend. Follow and subscribe
to this podcast and even sign up for our newsletter
at BeLoveBeekeeping .com Also, just a shout out
to Vita B Health for their support, we appreciate
them. Vita's Varroa Control range of products
includes Epistan, Epigard, and now Veroxan, Extended
Release Oxalic Acid Strips. Thanks guys. And
remember, if you're not just in it for the honey
or the money, you're in it for the love. See
you next week.