A beehive that takes almost all the work out of harvesting honey — no need to don a protective hood and smoke out your precious bees — has won this year’s Good Design Awards, joining the Microsoft HoloLens, Mazda MX-5 and the sustainable Nev House in snagging top honours. Built by a father and son team out of the far north coast of New South Wales, it’s another plaudit for a very cool little gadget.
The Flow Hive is an entirely different design for a beehive to the conventional box, where the entire hive has to be dismantled to retrieve honeycombs and honey. Instead, the entire unit can be kept together and a single level opens the cells in each honeycomb, draining through a tube directly into a jar or drum at the front of the Flow Hive. The gadget’s creators hope that it extends the appeal of beehives to city dwellers.
Flow Hive has won the overall Good Design of the Year Award, little more than a year after an extraordinarily successful Indiegogo campaign that smashed its $70,000 target in five minutes and went on to raise $12.2 million in total — the sixth highest crowdfunding venture ever.
Other winners this year were the Good Design Award for Sustainability winner Nev House, the Mazda MX-5 for the Automotive & Transport design category, Microsoft’s Hololens for the Consumer Electronics category, and the Acorns app for digital design.