Australian Story: October 26

Monday’s Australian Story profiles Byron Bay beehive inventor Cedar Anderson, who used a crowdsourcing site to raise US$12.2 million worth of advance orders.

Now he has to run a multi-million dollar company.

This episode is introduced by Chris Russell.

It’s the inventor’s maxim – there must be a better way!

Ten years ago, Byron Bay inventor, Cedar Anderson, looked at a beehive and thought there must be an easier way to extract honey straight from the hive that was less stressful on the bees.

A third generation beekeeper, Cedar roped in his father, Stuart, and together they set about the long process of developing prototypes to make it happen.

“When Cedar gets an idea, he’s utterly tenacious. He really believes that if the human mind has worked something out, he can too.” – Radha Nicholson (Cedar’s mother)

Living on the smell of an oily rag and working in his shed near Byron Bay, Cedar eventually came up with the concept of the Flow Hive – a plastic frame that sits inside a conventional beehive. With the pull of a lever, honey simply drains into a jar.

“People say inventors forget everything when they see their invention work for the first time. They forget the whole world around them. We had invented the beekeeper’s dream.” – Cedar Anderson (inventor)

But it was what happened next that took the world by storm. Earlier this year, Cedar decided to put the invention up on a crowdfunding site, hoping to raise $70,000 in advance orders to set up a tool for manufacture. The video of the Flow Hive went viral and the money and the media attention came pouring in.

“We overwhelmed one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms in the world. We had people screaming out, ‘take our money!’ People didn’t even know what they were buying. It was a frenzy. It was like a rock concert, we were just shocked.”- Yari McGrorie (colleague)

By the end of the campaign, they had US$12.2 million worth of advance orders and a monumental task ahead of them.

After a life tinkering quietly in a shed, Cedar and Stuart now face the challenge of running a multimillion dollar company. How will they cope?

Monday, October 26 at 8pm on ABC.