Μελισσοκόμοι στην Αυστραλία εφηύραν μια επαναστατική κυψέλη

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Two beekeepers in Australia have invented what is believed to be the world's first hive that allows fresh honey to be collected without having to disturb the bees and with no threat of stings.

Credited with "revolutionising" beekeeping, Cedar Anderson and his father Stuart borrowed money from friends and family and spent a decade creating a contraption which they say is "easier on the beekeeper and on the bees". 

The pair began selling their invention on a crowdsourcing site and raised $1.7 million (£1.1 million) in the first 24 hours.

"It is incredible – I am shocked," Stuart Anderson, 60, a former social worker, told The Telegraph. "I didn't anticipate how many people must have been hovering, waiting for something like this." 

The father and son team – both amateur inventors – come from a long line of backyard beekeepers near the popular surfing and tourist destination of Byron Bay in northern New South Wales.
Their contraption, called the Flow Hive, consists of plastic artificial honeycomb cells in which the bees leave honey before sealing the cells with wax. A lever then splits the wax and turns the cells to create zigzagging channels for the honey to flow out via a tap into a trough below.
Mr Anderson said his grandfather would "rob" honey from hives in trees on neighbouring properties and his father began keeping bees legally in the garden.
He and his son have long kept hives in their backyard – handing out honey to friends – and began searching for a better way to extract the honey. 

Cedar Anderson, 34, a musician who describes himself as a "backyard engineer", said "it has gone totally nuts".
"About a decade ago, I started thinking there must be a better way than ripping the hive apart and getting stung and sweating out in your protective gear in the sun," he told The Telegraph.
"I thought it was ridiculous. It took a while but we got there." 

The pair initially searched through global patents and discovered that no device existed. The closest was a device which someone applied for in the 1920s but it was never invented; in any case, according to Stuart Anderson, the plans were flawed and would not have worked.
"We looked up patents when we realised we were onto something," he said. "There was something from the 1920s but they put it in and went no further.
We were surprised there was nothing out there and we were surprised we could then keep it quiet for so long." 


Cedar Anderson said the main stumbling block in developing the device had been finding a way to remove the honey from the cells – until he had a "eureka moment".
"For ages I was trying to get honey out of the hexagon cells but the problem was with the viscosity and surface tension of honey which means it stays in the shell if you tip it upside down," he said.
"One morning I had a brain wave. I realised that it could be a cell when the bees were filling it up but could turn into something else when you want to get the honey out."
This led to the inclusion of a lever which splits the full cells and creates channels down which the honey flows.
The next challenge for the duo will be to fulfil the incoming orders – more than 4,000 in the first 12 hours. They hope to begin sending out the first hives in June but will try to find larger overseas manufacturers, possibly in the United States.
"Our dream was that this would increase the bee population around the world and help people become engaged with bees," Stuart Anderson said. "Hopefully now people won't need to spend as much time harvesting."

Tο μάρκετινγκ της βιομηχανίας τροφίμων.

I'm going to give you some of the secrets about how we make you buy what we want you to buy.
So, as a marketer, when I'm first giving you a product, what's my job?
Well, my job is to make you want it, to crave it, to need it.
To think that is the best innovation in food since, well, since sliced bread.
But how do we do it?
Well I'm going to give you a really big example later that I'm going to break right down for you,
but let's just start by look at a few fun little things.
So here we have 'Shreddies', an old favourite, been around for years, very popular in the UK and Canada.
Without changing a single little thing about that product, they re-marketed them, re-branded them,
as brand new 'Diamond Shaped Shreddies'. Food marketing genuis right there.
In the 1950s there was a very important innovation in food, the instant mix cake. One of my personal favourites.
When they were first brought out all you needed to do was to add a little bit of water, who's not going to love that?
Well actually no one loved it, no one bought the bloody things.
So they did a bit of research and what they found was that the main consumer, the target consumer, the housewife, felt that it was cheating.
They didn't want to pass off such an easy thing as their own baking to their partners, their husbands, their families, whatever.
So what did the producers have to do?
They had to make it harder, so now you had to add water and an egg. And sales eggsploded!
But these examples, these are just chicken feed compared to what I really want to talk about tonight, and that is chickens, and pigs and cows.
So when we think about where chickens etcetera come from, we think about it a bit like that, that's sort of our insinctive idea.
But we all know if we really think about it, if we think about it deeply, it's probably a little bit more like that.
But that's a lot nicer, it's a lot more romantic.
So how do we give you this impression? Well, there are three techniques that we use, the third of which is our secret weapon and I am going to blow it for you tonight so please stay primed for that.
Let's look at technique number one: everybody believes what's on the label.
So let's look at some examples, some of my favourites, some of the ones I use all the time.
I'll use 'Farm Fresh', I'll use '100% natural, I'll use 'Butcher's choice'.
But what does that really actually mean? Well truthfully it doesn't mean very much.
We see that on the label, we feel a bit more confident.
But let's look at what a farm really looks like, it probably looks like that.
Now this is a concentrated animal feeding operation.
I'm going to run that past you again, it's a concentrated animal feeding operation.
That's not going to look great on a label, hence we use 'Farm Fresh'.
Innovation number two, this is what we use, we focus on progress.
Intensive farming was born out of necessity.
At the end of the Second World War, resources were extremely tight.
Farming had to be, it had to be by necessity very, very economical.
And we've learnt from that and we've built from that and we're able to now raise more and more animals in smaller and smaller spaces.
So we've got extremely good at it. If we looked at room about this size and this was turned into a chicken barn,
it's a one hundred seat theatre, how many chickens could we probably fit in this room now?
I'm going to say about four thousand. It's pretty impressive isn't it?
It would probably look a little bit like that.
Now the public aren't going to be massively keen on that, it's my job to make them feel a little bit better about it.
So how do I do it? Well, a basic principal in marketing.
We use the right choice of words, and by using the right choice of words, we can focus the conversation the way we want it to.
So we use an example like this. When you look at that picture where is your eye drawn?
It's drawn right to the middle of the page, massive letters, we've got 'strive to optimize'.
What we're looking at in the picture, in reverse, looks a bit like that.
But this looks a lot nicer because we're looking at 'strive to optimize', it makes us feel like there's progress, we feel good.
So the challenge for the marketers is to make the public feel comfortable about what they're seeing.
One of the side effects of intensive farming, of having so many animals in such a small space, unfortunatly, is obviously disease.
Because you put so many animals in a small space, they're going to get sick.
It is no secret that fifty percent of all the antibiotics in the world are used on farmed animals.
So how do you make the public feel okay with this? How does that happen?
My Job! How do I do it? I use the language of innovation.
So we go back to our old friends at porkcares.org, and what they do is, they say:
As farming has become more efficient, veterinarians have incorporated new technologies and methods into practice.
This makes us feel good, this is positive, yes? This is progress.
And when we're then marketing to future consumers, we would perhaps use something like this.
This is a colouring book. 'Pigs and Pork'.
It's absolutely gorgeous.
What we're doing here is we're getting the children to focus on the fact that we're using innovation.
So by bringing the pigs out from the muddy fields and into the clean barns,
we're taking them away from all that nasty dirty mud and all the diseases that are lurking there within. Positive.
So onto our secret weapon, this is what we really need to focus on.
So these two techniques alone, they are not going to work, we need a secret weapon, number three.
It is actually in this room right now.
*Calls out* Secret weapon!
It is... You!
But how do we do it?
When you're in the supermarket, you don't want to want to think about where those products have come from.
You don't want to think about how those animals have been reared, how they've been treated.
The power of willful ignorance cannot be overstated.
This is systemised cruelty on a massive scale, and we only get away with it because everyone is prepared to look the other way.
Thank you.

Μητρώο Συνταγογράφων Γεωργικών Φαρμάκων

Ξεκινά η ψηφιακή υπηρεσία του Μητρώου Συνταγογράφων Γεωργικών Φαρμάκων στην επίσημη ιστοσελίδα του Υπουργείου Παραγωγικής Ανασυγκρότησης Περιβάλλοντος και Ενέργειας.

Δυνατότητα εγγραφής στο παραπάνω μητρώο έχουν οι υπεύθυνοι επιστήμονες των καταστημάτων εμπορίας Γεωργικών Φαρμάκων καθώς επίσης και κάθε ενδιαφερόμενος ο οποίος κατέχει πτυχίο Γεωπόνου Π.Ε. ή Τ.Ε Φυτικής Παραγωγής ή Διοίκησης Γεωργικών Εκμεταλλεύσεων ή Θερμοκηπιακών Καλλιεργειών και Ανθοκομίας ή Τμήματος Βιολογικής Γεωργίας (για χρήσεις συμβατές με την βιολογική γεωργία).

Η διαδικασία εγγραφής των ενδιαφερόμενων στο Μητρώο Συνταγογράφων Γεωργικών Φαρμάκων είναι η εξής:

1. Από την επίσημη ιστοσελίδα του Υπουργείου (www.minagric.gr), επιλέγουν το εικονίδιο των Ψηφιακών Υπηρεσιών και δημιουργούν λογαριασμό χρήστη στις ψηφιακές υπηρεσίες.

 2. Από το μενού «Επιλογή Υπηρεσίας» επιλέγουν την «Αίτηση Υποψηφίου Συνταγογράφου Γεωργικών Φαρμάκων». Μετά τη συμπλήρωση όλων των πεδίων της φόρμας, επιλέγουν το εικονίδιο «Αποθήκευση».

3. Συμπληρώνουν και υπογράφουν την επισυναπτόμενη υπεύθυνη δήλωση του άρθρου 8 του ν. 1599/1986 και ακολούθως την συμπληρωμένη δήλωση την αναπαράγουν σε ηλεκτρονική μορφή μορφής pdf.

4. Αναπαράγουν σε ηλεκτρονική μορφή pdf τον βασικό τίτλο σπουδών που κατέχουν.

Για την αρχική εγγραφή κάθε ενδιαφερόμενος υποβάλλει μόνο μία αίτηση ηλεκτρονικά και δεν απαιτείται τα δικαιολογητικά να υποβληθούν εγγράφως στη ΔΑΟΚ.