Sometimes the simplest ideas are the best - and a Canberra company has come up with a simple but brilliant innovation which has now won it the country's sought-after award for good design.
HiveIQ makes a new type of beehive which has won the Good Design Award award from Good Design Australia which said that the product "includes features and innovations that represent the future of beekeeping".
It's a combination of ideas - some low-tech and some hi-tech. The result is a manufacturing company in Canberra, making a product which has taken off in sales.
One innovation is to make the hive out of a type of plastic (ultra-high-density expanded Polystyrene) rather than the traditional wood. The plastic insulates the hive, and so the bees, more effectively.
And happy bees are productive bees. The company reckons that its innovation increases output by 30 per cent.
The higher-tech, not-so-simple innovation is to pack the hive with all sorts of electronics which mean it and the bees can be monitored remotely from many miles away.
It means that bee keepers get information about the temperature and humidity of the hive. They also get the weight of the hive, and that information reveals the state of the bees. They can know if there is a Queen in the hive - and no Queen means no honey.
So far about 10,000 of the hives have been sold. The two big markets are Australia and North America. Because the bee season runs from spring to autumn, a northern hemisphere and a southern hemisphere market ensures round-the-year demand.
Apart from increasing the amount of honey which bees produce, it cuts costs. Bee keepers don't have to travel to hives if they don't need to.
And the way the industry works is that bee keepers and bees work some distance from each other. "Some of these honey guys are 11 hours' drive from the hives," John Robinson one of the founders of HiveIQ, said.
The original idea came from third-generation Canberra beekeeper Victor Croker and Dave Leehmuis who were running a commercial beekeeping operation. They saw a way of improving the health and productivity of the bee colonies through the use of insulated hives.
Since 2010, he experimented with different materials and designs for hives. Eventually, the business was set up, both developing the product but also manufacturing it.
People keep bees for different reasons. Some want the honey and others want the bees to pollinate plants. Almond-growers, for example, set hives among trees so the bees pollinate the flowers - no bees, no almonds.
If there are lots of trees, they need lots of bees - and the new hives can assess the number of bees inside and convey the information back to the beekeeper. The farmer assesses the number of flowers in an area and then puts the right number of bees there.
"They'll put more hives where they've got more flowers so knowing how many bees are in the hive determines where they place it," Mr Robinson said.
Similarly, if the weight of the hive is increasing, the beekeeper can work out how much honey the bees have produced, and calculate when to travel to collect the honey.
The result is happier bees, happier bee keepers - and a happier company with a design award.
