Why Are Beekeepers So Angry About This New Invention?

It's new. It's not something that's been done like this before.

Let's talk about the Micro Honey Harvester then. It's One Gold up in Wandia. It's brand new. It's not been released yet.

No.

What does it do? What is it? Tell me about it.

A lot of the steps that cause us hassle, and there's one really key reason for all of this, Laurence.

What a lot of people are saying is, I don't want something so small. It's going to take me absolutely ages to do it. It's not for me.

Keep it really simple. It's to harvest small amounts of honey really fast. Probably sounds a bit unbelievable, But is this here the new format of how we can have a quality mark on high-quality, real honey?

Why would you want to mess around with something so small when you can have a big extractor instead?

I actually see a real opportunity here to impact the issue of honey fraud.

It's not available for sale just yet though, is it? But it's coming very, very soon. So tell me about kind of like production and when it's likely to hit and where it's going to be available worldwide.

Earlier this year, we had a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for pre-sales. to our most courageous early adopters, and we sold into 8 countries during that phase.

We have a special guest in the apiary today. Simon Mildren, owner of Hivekeepers and the inventor of the Micro Honey Harvester, has visited us in the apiary today, and we are going to talk about his wonderful product. So, Simon, welcome on board.

Great to be here with you, Laurence. Thanks for having me along.

Isn't it crazy how we, we spoke a little bit on emails and then we randomly bumped into each other at Apimondia about what, 3 days ago, and now we are in the UK talking about your products in my apiary. That's a bit weird, no?

It's amazing to be here. Excited to see your apiary, and yeah, happy to talk about all of this.

Cool. So we'll get on to the Micro Honey Harvester because it is really, really good invention. But tell me first, Apimondia, did you enjoy it?

Apimondia was incredible. When you're there as an exhibitor, you get a bit carried away with that side of it. It would have been amazing to see everything else that was going on. But in all honesty, we had a great time. My team loved it. It's about meeting different people. It's about seeing what other people are doing. So I've ticked all those boxes.

I totally get what you're saying though about being there kind of like working. Like it'd be nice to be there as a beekeeper, wouldn't it? And go and like test out and try all the things. And I went round and looked at the different things, but you know what it's like, you're filming, it's difficult. Yeah. So you got some prizes, didn't you, from Apimondia? You won, what did you win? Go on, tell everyone.

Completely exciting us, surprising us. Not what we expected, but we won the gold medal for the Class 19 Award for the World Beekeeping Awards, which is for innovation.

Wow.

Out of 55 different incredible inventions, there's a lot of amazing inventions there. We came out on top with our micro honey harvester.

That's crazy. 55 is a big number. Do they always have that many people enter the innovation awards?

No, they actually don't. From what we heard in the event, does it normally maybe 5 to 7 or 8 different inventions each time. Yeah, this— I'm not sure what it was about it this time, but to think that there was 55, uh, different innovations there, uh, great for people to see what's coming. But, um, yeah, we're really chuffed to, uh, go so well.

Yeah, so let's talk about the Micro Honey Harvester then. It's won gold at Apimondia, it's brand new, it's not been released yet.

No.

What does it do? What is it? Tell me about it.

Yeah, so it comes from the many problems of us being a small-scale beekeeper myself for a long time. For me, I've We went through all of the troubles that a lot of other people face with when it comes to harvesting honey, and we wanted a really simple and easy way to harvest small amounts of honey fast.

Fast.

We wanted it to be quick, we wanted it to be easy, we wanted to remove a lot of the steps that cause us hassle. And there's one really key reason for all of this, Lawrence, and that is we wanted to be able to get back to enjoying the bees and spending time with them and not feeling such a demand about the effort that goes into honey harvesting. And that's exactly what we've aimed to achieve here with this. Cool.

So I've got some nice B-roll of this. Tell people how it works and I'll show them with the visuals in the video as well. Go from the very beginning. How does it work?

I guess the most obvious thing people look at is we've got a microharvester machine that's a small, we'll call it like a bucket, which has a motorized section in the bottom of that. But it's actually, that's probably the secondary component. The clever part or the most important bit are the frames with the cassettes. And if it wasn't for those cassettes, which is probably where we spent most of our time in research and development, we wouldn't have this invention. to the point that it's at. Quite simply, we've got a cassette, a 2-part cassette, that when it is connected together, it has sealed cells in the bottom of each of the honeycomb structure. When it is pulled apart, there's an opening in the bottom of each of those cells. And that opening at the bottom, Lawrence, allows us to actually harvest honey from the inside out rather than having to remove cappings and go through the effort of removing cappings. And what we've found is if we don't have to remove the cappings, We actually don't have to really filter the honey at the other end of it. So if you can imagine a 2-part piece, and I'm sure people are seeing a lovely bit of footage now.

Yeah, yeah.

2 pieces come apart, we slot them into the Micro Honey Harvester with the inside facing out, a short push of the button, and for 30 seconds it would spin. And that's when you get that incredible visual of the honey spinning and flicking out the honey on the side of the container and then draining down the walls of that. And it lasts about 30 seconds. And most of the time that harvests at least 80%, if not more, of the honey.

I've got so many questions. Like, just as you're talking, I'm like, oh, I want to ask this, I want to ask that. There's some other bits that you missed out, which I think are really good selling points, though. So the first one is there's no plug. How is it powered?

Yeah, we've kept it really simple. We wanted it to be that you could just walk down to your bee yard and do the work in your bee yard if you chose to. So it's just got a battery-powered motor in the base of the unit that can harvest 2 entire frames and some, even more than that, without it needing recharging. But the good thing there is, is you could just take a power bank with you, plug it in, and you can keep going forever.

Nice.

And that was actually one of the first questions we got from some beekeepers was, well, what if I wanted to take this to a market stall and show my potential customers how we can harvest honey in front of them and show them that? It's a real treat for them to see that. We'll just plug it into a power bank or into a standard USB power supply and away you go.

I've got so many questions and I've seen so many questions on social media and people saying things and like, I'm quite used to this, which is you bring out a new product, or you do something different, and you get a lot of people that kind of slap you down a bit and say, oh, that's rubbish, that's not what I thought it was going to do, that's not, that's not what I want. So the things that I hear about your honey extractor are, why would you want to mess around with something so small when you can have a big extractor instead?

Yep, fair question. And for a lot of people, and you know, this isn't true to all, but they started beekeeping to keep bees, and the surplus honey side of things was what happened afterwards. And by having, being able to harvest just the honey that they need rather than that becoming Not having a huge chore related to having bees in the first place helps them come back to that original purpose. It's also possible that when you can harvest small amounts quickly, you can actually still harvest a lot of honey. And most people don't believe that until they start seeing how it works in action. But you can harvest an entire frame in about 5 minutes. Now, every now and again, Lawrence, I get laughed at for that. And I don't— I'm not surprised, because when you think about the large extraction equipment you could have—

Yeah.

Well, you might spin out 8 or 10 frames, or even just 3 or 4 frames in In a very short amount of time.

Yeah.

Well, the difference here lies in you don't need to do any setup. You're not preparing for hours beforehand, and you're definitely not waiting for hours or days afterwards for filtering and bottling. So I guess to people that are, that are thinking about what you've just asked, we have a system that can harvest small amounts really quickly. You can do it often, you can do it weekly, you can do it every 2 weeks without feeling like you're dragging out all that bulky gear that is quite frankly, tiring and tough to store and look after.

So I think that's a really good answer, and it was a totally loaded question because I was playing devil's advocate, which is I've got a 12-frame extractor, I've got a 30-frame extractor, and I've got access to like a 40-frame extractor as well, but I want this because it does something completely different to any of those extractors. Say I'm having like a dinner party or something, and this is where I think I would use this most. Got a few people around for dinner and I want to show them like some of my different bits of honey, So I can either go and just get a jar of honey and be like, there you go, there's my honey. And they're like, oh, fantastic, open it up and taste it. Or we can like add the drama in and say, well, the honey's in here, we've got to get it out. And the way we're going to get it out is putting it in here. And like, I'll put the visuals up now. It's cool, isn't it? It's fun, it's exciting. And I bet you, and I know people will, they'll look at it and be like, whoa, that's so cool.

Well, I can tell you that even now, and I am by far the person that has spun the most honey in one of these machines, Every time I still do it, it's a wonder to me. I absolutely love seeing it. And it is a real treat to show other people how it works. And that's exactly what we saw at Apimondia was just the surprise and delight on people's faces when they got to see a new way to harvest honey.

Every single time you do one of these cassettes, you get that, don't you? And then you get this other beautiful benefit, which I know you know all about, which is, you know, this cassette here is going to have different honey from this cassette here and this one here. So every single time you're getting a different taste. Can't do that with a 12-frame extractor, can you? Because it's just all getting homogenised into one You've—

that is such an incredible part about this is you can have a different experience across the one frame and you can make sure you get that advantage by doing this. And there's something that I'm not even going to try to pretend I know that this is proven in science or has some sort of backing by some researcher. But when you get honey so fresh out from under the cappings, we know what it— you would know what it tastes like. Many people know what it tastes like when you have some fresh honeycomb straight from a hive.

Yeah.

Well, the way that this remains capped the entire time from beehive through to the moment you get to harvest it here and enjoy that with, for example, Saturday night with your friends at the dinner table.

Living the party style.

Living the party style. That's exactly right. But you get to have the most freshest, genuine honey experience without the honey having even been oxidised in that time since normal harvesting, it would've been through a bit of a process.

Yeah, and that's a brilliant selling point. We talk a lot in the UK about raw honey and there's a big court case at the moment, but people understand what raw honey is, even if there's no legal parameters for it. They know that it's not come into contact with lots of heat. They know that it's not been tampered with. And you don't get any real way of kind of guaranteeing or preserving that by taking out the frame and saying, there you go. So my next question is, I think it's quite ingenious the way that these cassettes work, because normally you have your wax cappings on the front and you have your wax cappings on the back and, you know, you cut down like that or cut down like that and then you spin the frame out and it all comes out. That's not how this works, is it? So if I take the little—

Here, take this one.

Okay, we'll take that one there.

There's one I've got that's nice and convenient for you.

So if we take it apart like that and flip it over, that's how we spin, isn't it? So that for me is quite a fundamental change in the way that honey is extracted. How did you develop that and how many iterations did you go through before you got to that?

I would have to say that with this cassette, we are probably, with micro iterations of changing little moments at a time on the journey, we've probably changed about 30 different things from the beginning. Wow.

And sorry, and did it start by that flip? Was that the beginning?

We had a hypothesis that we would probably do that.

Okay.

But we went back. You might remember scientific method from, from secondary school or high school. And we actually had a real scientific process around testing different parts before we would progress all the way through. We knew that there was going to be a way to get honey out from behind, but we didn't quite know the best way to do it. So we had about, I'm going to say about 6 different methods all on the one frame, all set up in a way to be able to test them at once to find out which was the most sensible and easy way to go. Now, where we've landed has taken about 5 different full testing regimes with about 30 moments that we've had to make adjustments. Yeah.

And plastic moulding mould costs are not cheap, are they?

No, no. We've been able to, we've been able to do that fairly economically. It's good when you've got an incredibly talented design partner. They know how to, they know how to keep things relatively economically economical. But the actual design here, the special part about our design is the way that these 2 cassettes come together. It's not like this is not new, the idea of spinning honey, I realise that.

Yeah.

But the way we've got this surface here interacting and making it as easy as possible for the bees, but so that it comes out clean, that has taken a long time.

That really has. It's revolutionary, I would say, because it's, it's normally, like I said, you uncap and you spin, whereas this way you don't. You— so you get this little device in here, you do a quarter turn, it opens it up, and then it's that flip there. And for me, like, the thought behind that flip is such a simple movement, but it just opens up that possibility, doesn't it?

It completely changes it.

What I love about it as well is that kind of like matrix structure. And I've got some really nice visuals of that kind of showing it up to the light.

Great.

It's, it's quite unique and I don't really understand how it works. So go on, talk to me about that microstructure there.

Yeah, certainly. Well, firstly, let's talk about the bees because that's— they've been front and centre, less so the beekeeper. Obviously, I've got concerns about solving a problem for beekeepers. Yeah, but first we had to think about the bees. And the critical part was that when these are together, once we knew that this was the approach we were going with, I know you You probably can't see that very easily from the position you've got there, but the same rhomboidal structure that is on the inside of a normal cell that the bees would create exists inside this. It is exactly the same faceted rhomboidal structure. That's a complicated way to start and then work back from there to make sure that we can have every cell still has an open section when pulled apart.

Okay.

So some of these, when they're, when they're pulled apart, have a 50% closure. Others Around the edges might have a little bit less.

Okay.

But overall, we had to find out a way that when these 2 surfaces came together, that it was true to what the bees would be used to dealing with.

Yeah.

As soon as we depart from that idea, I've— we found it with some of our early versions, the bees were not interested. The bees would take a lot longer to get in there and do any work.

Okay.

And when we pulled them apart, we'd have too much beeswax there getting in the way.

Yeah. So before we talk about some of the more technical details, answer me this question: who are your competitors?

You said you'd bring some of the pointy questions out, didn't you? But I'm happy to hear that. So there's the traditional methods of honey harvesting. Let's talk about those. So there's having large bulky gear out there, you know, needing normal uncapping methods, down to just simple hot knives and what have you. So those that produce those, those that produce honey extraction machines, I guess That's the other way to do this, isn't it?

So we'll talk about some of the technical details in a little bit, but here we go. Who are your biggest competitors?

I guess the most simple way to look at that is the existing hardware that's out there to harvest honey. So whether that is some sort of uncapping machine or mechanism, actual harvesters, filtration units, settling tanks, all of the different methods that are required to harvest honey traditionally, that's, I guess, where a point of difference from those. And, and maybe people would choose this over those methods. Everyone comes up to us and asks, oh, well, what about how do you compare to Flow Hive? That's a really obvious one, and people are going to point that out. And whilst I think there's similarities, there's, there's different ways that we've aimed to work. We had a real clear way of wanting to fit in with existing beehives, in that this frame can go in, just fit, take up the same space as a normal frame. That was one of our parameters right back at the beginning. And apart from the fact that this is a Langstroth, frame that we've got designed first, we know we can adjust to other sizes quite easily. So for us, that was really important. And I guess they're the ones that we're compared to the most, along with the traditional harvesting equipment.

Yeah. So it was again an incredibly loaded question because I don't think you have any competitors. I honestly don't.

People say that. I remember you saying that when we met earlier.

And the reason I think that is because when I posted the video that I did at Apimondia, we had so many comments on there. People saying things like, just get a Flow Hive.

Oh yeah.

Or just get an extractor, that's going to take forever to extract my crop. So you've got these 2 groups of people, one who do the traditional method of extracting, maybe using like a normal extractor and normal frames, and then you've got this other group of people who have this automatic Flow Hive system. I think most people fall into one of those 2 camps, and my argument would be you're not going to compete with either of those 2 people fundamentally on what they do, but supplementary, it works perfectly with both of them.

Yeah.

And it gives you something that you cannot get from either of the other 2, which is that ability to kind of like take it back and present it, do it in small portions, do it only when the honey is ready. So I say like, who are your competitors? Nobody can offer anything like this and it is unique in the marketplace. I'm excited about it and I think it's going big places.

Well, and thank you. It's great to hear that feedback. And I do tend to agree with you. This is sort of category defining. It's new. It's not something that's been done like this before. It's not just a remake of something that already exists. It's definitely not that. Just ask our patent attorneys about that. They have definitely noted this is a novel new invention. And yeah, there is obviously other ways to harvest honey, but this is a bold step away from all of them.

Yeah, it really is. And I just, I wanted to kind of put that out there on my channel to say it's not either or.

Yeah.

It's both. And you see a lot of people in the UK, they'll make an investment of something like this, which is they'll go and do the market stalls and they'll dress the market stalls up nicely and they think, what can I do to kind of engage a little bit with the public? And generally what they do is they'll go down like a honey tasting route, which is open up some of the jars jars and do some tasting, which is brilliant and nice and gets people involved, or they'll spend £300 or £400 on like an observation hive and bring the bees there. Both really good valid approaches, one that doesn't cost that much money, one that costs quite a significant amount of money. How are you measuring that engagement with the people who come to your stall? And I think if you were to put that into the mix, I think that would be number one for engagement, because people like observation hives, they'll go up and they'll look and be like, oh yeah, that's cool, but there's no beginning and end, is there? It's just like, it's like a moving painting.

Yeah.

Whereas this is, This is the honey that's come from my beehive. This is the wax. This is the innovative way. Smell that, will you? Putting it in there, no cables because you just turn up. Doesn't matter if you've not got power and then you're pouring them this honey straight from here and allowing them to taste and it's not costing you that much money. I think this is where you're going to see every single person on every stall with one of these.

Well, you, when we were at Apimondia, that's exactly what we were doing. We had honey prepared in these from a Danish, local Danish beekeeper and we were harvesting in front of them. And when we were doing that, but that's where actually back to your point earlier about this is category defining. This is so new and different. There was beekeepers of 20, 30 years there that just rushed over to see to see what all the fuss was about. And that experience of like you just talked to of harvesting in front of them, letting them taste the honey that you've just harvested together, even better when you let them push the button, harvested honey together, and then just a moment later they're tasting that and you're saying, well, if you really enjoyed that honey, that This is it here for sale. You can take some of this home with you now. That storyline is really nice and works really well.

And it integrates, doesn't it, with that traditional style of beekeeping where you're going to extract like en masse? And it integrates also with the Flow Hive because you can just take this frame, it's a Langstroth frame, and you can just put it in a Flow Super. And okay, you might need to space it a little bit. I think it's slightly narrower than one of the Flow Supers, but it'd be really, really easy mod to do. And then for anyone with a Langstroth beehive, you just put that in.

That's right.

So you've just got one beehive's worth of space You get some of your cassettes. Talk me through how you would prime this. So if you were going to put this into a beehive, like, how would you, how would you get it ready?

What do you need to do? So it's important to do that, and we don't hide behind it at all, that we know that bees don't tend to choose plastic first over beeswax. We know that, like, that's, that should come as no surprise to people. And there are different ways to prime this to make sure it is in the best state for the bees to accept it. We've found a few things that it definitely don't do and a few things that you'll And we found the best way to do it. We don't want people to roll on lots of liquid beeswax. We don't want them to dip it in liquid beeswax because what ends up happening is it gets stuck in the bottom too thick and it blocks up the mechanism. Just a hassle for you. But what works really well, and you just basically grab the whole unit, you get a nice big chunk of beeswax and just rub it on thick and rub it on hard. And you want it to be a little bit flaky because what we've found. is when the bees see that there's beeswax slightly not in the right place, they get in there, move around, get to work, climb all over the frame, climb into the cells, and reposition that beeswax. And that's what's worked really well for us. So do that on both sides, be generous with it, but you should have relatively good success in good time, providing there's some sort of nectar flow in the area.

I've had experience with plastic foundation, and it is that you need to make sure you get a good coating on there. But yeah, you don't want liquid beeswax here For the reasons that you said, but also for the warping with plastic. It can warp and stuff like that. And the other thing that I'd mentioned about plastic in the comments that were on there were people saying, we don't want more plastic, we don't want microplastics. Tell me about kind of like the protections that you've got on that and just kind of tell me about the use of plastic.

So there's around 8,000 types of plastics. It's a lot that are available for manufacturing. About 4,000 of those are food safe. And then from there it comes down to choosing something, Food safe means stabilised, and then, then you want something which is going to suit the environment of a beehive nicely, and something that's economically useful. So we've gone for a type of plastic that works really well in that setting. Additionally, and I don't know how much of a big deal it is here in the UK, but to be able to irradiate these if there is some sort of disease presence in your apiary, we can irradiate these cassettes 15 times before they'll show some sort of degradation.

Oh, wow.

We know that, we've had that information from a plastics expert. So we're really content. We've got a sensible plastic that the bees will take to and it will work nicely for us. What I will say though, and this is really important to my design team and myself, like this is a really obvious way to do this at the moment as a new business starting out to try to bring a new innovation to the market. We're learning every day about different materials, different options that we could possibly build this out of in the future. Now that's not this year, that's not next year, it's probably not even the year after that, if I'm honest, Lawrence. But the R&D cycle takes time. But I speculate and wonder that of what this might be able to be made out of in the future. But at least in the short term, we've got a really good stable option to work with.

Yeah, and I think we use plastics in lots of different things, and sometimes even the people that moan about plastics and microplastics are kind of using these plastics elsewhere. The big benefit with this one here, there's no heat ever introduced into the plastics at all. Yeah, apart from like the general heat that's generated in the beehive. And we know that when you start to heat plastics, that's when it's going to start causing issues. But this, there's just no Heat whatsoever, is there? So it's preserving that honey in the best possible state in food-grade plastic. I'm definitely comfortable with that. So I really do like the product, but you've obviously got a target market, a target consumer. Who do you think is going to buy one of these across the world?

Uh, at this stage, we've designed this with the really small-scale beekeeper in mind, so anyone with sort of maybe 1 to 5 beehives. We're not trying to replace an entire extraction method for someone with 20 or 100 beehives. That's not what we're trying to do at this point in time. So we've really thought about that small-scale beekeeper. That's who we've tested this with. That's who's been our biggest voice in the design here of, of the Micro Honey Harvester. So small-scale beekeepers, we touched on it before about those larger producers demonstrating product at market or in their own shop. And the other one too is beekeeping educators. So we think there's an opportunity then to have a really interactive experience with students or anyone wherever they go with educating the public about bees and honey.

So Simon mentioned a very important word there, education. If you want to stop guessing and start beekeeping like an expert, check out 14daybeekeeper.com. Our online course launches very soon. I think it's a really good point there in terms of defining that target customer, because what a lot of people are saying is, I don't want something so small, it's going to take me absolutely ages to do it, it's not for me. And I think maybe those people are missing the point a little bit. I Love your value proposition. So what is your value proposition for the Micro Honey Harvester?

Keep it really simple. Yeah, it's to harvest small amounts of honey really fast.

And it is the speed element that I think that a lot of people miss. Yeah, they look at it and they say, oh, it's a cassette, oh, it's really small, oh, it's going to take me a long time to extract all of my honey. And it's not designed for that purpose, is it? It is designed to give people a taste of your honey fast, incredibly fast.

Incredibly fast and almost on demand. So if you're inspecting your hive and just doing a normal check and you notice that there's surplus honey there that's— that you could happily take, well, take a few cassettes worth at a time. No need to save yourself up for that big once or twice a year honey harvest. Take little bits at a time really quickly in between your normal activities and enjoy fresh honey more often and not have to go through the pain and suffering— I know what it's like— of spending an entire weekend trying to harvest honey and the following week to clean it up. That's a real pain for a lot of people, and we feel like we've overcome that with this.

Yeah, it definitely fixes the problem. And I think there's another target market in there, especially one that we see in the UK, which is, which is hands-off beekeepers. It's beekeepers that want to keep bees and they want to enjoy the bees and kind of have the bees do the best for the environment, but they're not that fussed about taking off that much honey. They say, I don't want a full super. I definitely don't want 6 full supers. What I'm going to do with 6 full supers of honey? I just want a little taste for me, and I want a little taste for my friends. And this ticks the box for them, doesn't it?

It does. And at first there, I thought you were going to say hands-off beekeeping in regards to them not needing to do much with their bees. And I'm glad that you sort of turned it the way that you said it then, because we're really passionate about making it easier to look after your bees, but take a little bit of honey as you need to, as it is available. rather than being dragged into that normal process of huge quantities of honey.

Yeah, it's a really nice idea. What you could possibly do here, Simon is a massive innovator, and this is just an idea that I've had here. So imagine we've got this and we want to put it into a Flow Hive.

Yeah.

Or any sort of frame, you could build a queen excluder around it and put it into the brood box, couldn't you? And then you've not, you don't even need a super then, and you can harvest honey.

You've got it. So we've actually tried this and we've used—

I thought that was like an original idea there.

No, no, it's a good idea. Because you're just thinking of the biology of the bees and working within that. And it's being able to have a queen, one of those larger frame cages that usually is to isolate the queen on the inside, isolate her out of there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And put one or two of these in there. That's absolutely doable, and it keeps it in the brood area. Not a bad way to keep the bees with access to the honey all year round, even in the colder times, but it's there without being impacted by the queen.

Yeah.

Which can be a hassle.

It's a really, really good way of doing it. So it's not available for sale just yet though, is it? But it's coming very, very soon. So tell me about kind of like production and when it's likely to hit and where it's going to be available worldwide.

Earlier this year, we had a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign for presales to our most courageous early adopters, and we sold into 8 countries during that phase. And we have delivery for those people at the later part of this year. So I'll be actually— I've actually got a shipment of frames right now Arriving to me soon, so the frames final manufactured version of the frames coming to me now, and they will be our first customer being provided with those. In saying that, there are some countries that can buy straight off our website now. Okay, hivekeepers.com. But that's just a that's just a really limited to Australia and the U.S. at the moment, and that's just because the requirements to be to be set up legitimately is a little bit harder. Yeah. What I will say though, we land in Kentucky for the North American Honeybee Expo, and that is our target date to have product available.

Oh, nice.

And I say that because I've put it in the public now, and it's our absolute ambition to have frames and cassettes there. And either the harvester will be there at production quantity, or it won't be far away. Now, I can't make a perfect promise about this bit, but this is the bit you need first anyway.

That's true.

And it's, it's, it's springtime in the southern hemisphere now, so they're getting excited and wanting to get the product to the But for the Northern Hemisphere, that's going to take a bit of time before we get that. So I think we've got the right amount of lead time for that manufacturing process to really come in. And we are hoping that it's readily accessible come early 2026.

Nice. And is the idea that it's just going to be worldwide everywhere in the end, or is there like select countries?

I think the focus right now is Australia, home country, US, Canada, New Zealand, UK, and Europe.

Okay. That's quite a lot.

No, it's a lot. Yeah, it's a lot. But we can see what the demand is like already. We can see what the interest is. We know we've got to make modifications to the type of frames that will suit this so that it can go into more beehives.

But I guess the cassettes just stay exactly the same.

Yeah, this was the most thought-through bit of what can work across multiple different formats of frames. So yeah, not long now and we'll have product in people's hands.

Amazing. I'm so excited to kind of see them being used and watching them. And I know I'm going to go to market stalls and stuff and see people playing with these. Very, very cool. Okay, well, I definitely don't need the hard sell because I am getting one of these for myself without a doubt. But what does the future hold for the Micro Honey Harvester? But more importantly, what does the future hold for Simon and hivekeepers?

Well, there's a lot going on, and as I'm sure you can imagine when you try to bring a product to market across such a large area, we've spent years in development for this. There's a lot of moving parts, but I sort of get excited. So I'm busy, I'm very busy. That probably answers that first bit. There's a lot that we're working on there. For, for me though, the future is more than just this one market. I actually see a real opportunity here to impact the issue of honey fraud. Now that was a big talking point in Apimondia, and the reason— and actually it's actually one of the original starting points of this entire innovation. And I suppose what does that mean? Because we haven't talked about it in the entire interview so far. Can we— this is a question that we don't have to have the answer for right now— but can we create a new format for how honey goes from the beehive to the honey consumer? Not just the beekeeper, but the consumer that people feel is trustworthy and different and protects the integrity of the honey? That's a question that I've put out there to my team, and it's a question I talk to lots of people about. Is this here— probably sounds a bit unbelievable, but is this here the new format of how we can have a quality mark on high-quality, real honey?

It's blown my mind a little bit there, because if someone said to me, what's the best way to ensure that your honey is pure, I would say keep your own bees, extract your own honey. But then if you don't keep bees, like, how do you, how do you do it then? You can't kind of just rely on your neighbour or you have to rely on trust. So if you were to kind of take one of these cassettes here and mass market them so they're in the shops, is this, is this where you're getting at? So I can go and buy one of these and I've just got one of these at home and that's the only way I consume honey because that is really clever.

25 years ago, home coffee machines were not a common thing. You could have— there was a little bit of some primitive sort of machinery, but now every home has some sort of fancy or clever coffee machine. And whether you love it or not, the Nespresso pod system was a real, I suppose, a starting point for that. So without trying to draw the perfect analogy, because it isn't quite perfect, but what if this could be the Nespresso— this could be the Nespresso machine for honey? That's the vision I've got for the next 10, 15 years. And the real aim that sits behind that is about making making pure, high-quality honey accessible to just about anyone anywhere.

It's a lovely idea. I can see the technical challenges that would come with that. My number one challenge would be I don't want to go and buy something plastic and use it for my honey and then chuck it away, you know, so that, you know, the next step is going to be how do you recycle it, how do you send them back. Have you, have you thought about that? I'm sure you have.

Uh, so a lot of these questions are deferred to future Simon. Okay, yeah, well, of course, because they are big issues. Yeah, uh, there are huge issues in And this wasn't easy, but we got there. And what we've just spoken to, and your mind will be racing, my mind just keeps on going with it all the time. There are so many technical challenges, so many just business access challenges, but that's okay. Nothing's— everything starts with an idea and nothing usually happens quickly in this sort of space. So that's just the beginning.

Yeah.

And I just want to plant the seed with you about where it's going. And of course our minds go to try to fix all those things to begin with, but But if I worried about all those things at the start, I'd never get going and we never would've had this in the first place. So here we are.

And I love that approach, like more than anything. Yeah, there's nothing worse than someone looking at a problem and saying, ah, it's just too difficult, I can't be bothered to fix it. If it was easy to do, everyone would be doing it. You're trying to break big problems. And you know, like you said before, if you changed it from plastic to bamboo or something—

There are so many materials that are in our future that we need to test and learn and understand more about. And that's a real exciting part of that potential vision in the future.

Yeah, and there's, that's me picking holes in it and saying, oh, well, they've got the plastic issue. But if you look at fundamentally what you're doing there is you're taking pure raw honey out of the beehive. You're not exposing it to any air. You're giving it to the supermarket, the supermarket gives it to the consumer. The first time that they open it up is the first time that that honey has ever been exposed to the air.

It's a pretty big deal.

It's pure. It's going to be the rawest, purest honey that you can ever get. It is gonna be superior to the honey from the traditional beekeeper or the Flow Hive beekeeper, even if it's only incremental. I don't think you can argue that it's not gonna be superior because it's not been tampered to the same level.

Absolutely. No, it's a real step change in the potential for the future of commercial honey production. And I know there's lots of people listening to this right now just going, he's lost his mind. And I'm okay hearing that 'cause guess what? I've heard all of that before.

Yeah.

But it takes big ambitions that don't necessarily have a clear roadmap or don't have a clear, easy pathway to come up with whole new ways of doing things and whole new concepts. That's, that's what I'm excited about with our future. And we've got to obviously get one product to market successfully first and create a sustainable business, number one. And then hopefully from there, you're seeing us move in that other direction.

Excellent. Well, before I finish this video, I'm going to let you in on a little I'm gonna tell you a little tiny secret. So Simon is an expert at marketing. He's very, very good at it. And about 6 months ago, Simon emailed me and said, we're introducing this product here. Do you wanna do some kind of marketing with us and post some videos and we'll give you kind of commission and do stuff like that? A standard affiliate program. And I said, Simon, I love this product. Everything I've seen about it, I really do like it, but I can't recommend stuff unless I've played with it and tested it and broken it. It's just not something that I'm willing to do. I can't vouch for it unless I can literally vouch for it. So I said, stay in contact, I'm sure we can do something in the future. What I need you to do though is I need you to send me the cassettes, I need you to send me the honey extractor, I need to play with them over the course of 12 months, I need to make sure that I am happy that it all works well, and then I'm happy to do some videos and do some promotion. So the email trail went dead after that, and then randomly I just met Simon at Apimondia. He had the cassettes, they were full of honey, he had the micro honey harvester, and I said, let's go and do a video. We need somewhere quiet to do the clicky clacky video, And Simon took me back to his hotel room, not like that, took me back to his hotel room when we filmed this video. And I probably walked back and forth across the hivekeeper stand for maybe 15, 20 times through all of these different extractions that were going on. And every single time it was as simple as this. You took the cassette, he opened it up, he flipped it round like that, put it into the extractor, spun it all out, all the honey come round, he scraped it up into a jar, people tasted it and they absolutely loved it. So I'm in a position now where I genuinely can Vouch for the product. The product works. I've seen it work multiple times. I've tasted the honey that comes out of it. There's no need for me to do any further testing. If you're interested in buying this product, I personally recommend it and personally vouch for it. It does what it says on the tin. It gives you access to raw, pure honey very fast indeed. So, Simon, thank you so much for coming and visiting me up in the apiary. It's been an absolute pleasure. Have you got any final words for the audience?

I've absolutely loved having the conversation. Look, there are going to be people here that like this doesn't suit, and that's not a problem at all. But we're excited about like creating real opportunities for beekeepers to get back and spend more time with their bees, less hassle when it comes to harvesting. And we just really like to hear back from people on their experiences because this has been a massive learning journey, but that hasn't finished. That's going to keep going, and the interaction with beekeepers has been the most important bit so far.

Excellent. It's a brilliant innovation. And thank you for putting yourself out there and trying to break down and bring new products there. I'm really excited to see what comes next.

Thanks for having me.