Honey Harvesting and Backyard Beekeeping

Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): The Good Men Project

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/03/27 (Unpublished)

Simon Mildren, Founder and CEO of HiveKeepers, talks about the Micro Honey Harvester, a benchtop device designed for small-scale beekeepers. The innovation allows quick, clean honey extraction without disrupting bees or using traditional equipment. Mildren explains how the system ensures honey purity, minimizes contamination, and eliminates the need for filtering. The device uses cassette-based frames that can be harvested indoors, helping reduce bee disruption and honey fraud. Designed for Langstroth hives, it simplifies backyard beekeeping. Mildren emphasizes transparency, food safety, and empowering beekeepers with high-quality, unprocessed honey delivered directly from hive to table.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Today, we’re here with HiveKeepers, the Melbourne-based startup that launched the Micro Honey Harvester, an innovative benchtop device revolutionizing honey extraction. It’s a compact tool enables beekeepers with 1–5 hives to extract honey quickly—without uncapping, using giant extractors, filtering, or creating a mess. Designed to be bee-friendly and about the size of a small coffee machine, it makes backyard beekeeping more accessible and efficient than ever. Our guest Simon Mildren, founder and CEO of HiveKeepers, stated, “We’ve taken the labour out of harvesting and made fresh honey instantly accessible.” The Micro Honey Harvester is now live on Kickstarter. It is set to make global waves in sustainable small-scale beekeeping. Thank you for joining me today—I appreciate it.

Simon Mildren: Great to be here with you, Scott. Thanks.

Jacobsen: So, quick question—why micro honey harvesting rather than macro? It’s a good concept.

Mildren: Yes, thank you. I’ve been a beekeeper for over 15 years, Scott, but I’ve always been a small-scale backyard beekeeper. You wouldn’t see it here on camera, but just behind the wall are a couple of beehives. I’ve always kept it small—just a few hives. I did that to look after bees because it’s fascinating. That’s one part of it. The other part is the benefit to my garden and surroundings and, of course, the pleasure of having honey from those bees. But we were never trying to chase dozens upon dozens of kilos of honey, which most people do because there hasn’t been a better way to extract honey in small quantities. Traditionally, it’s big quantities, bulky equipment, and lots of time and effort. Most current extraction methods are modelled after or derived from the commercial honey industry. We saw an opportunity to lighten the load for small-scale beekeepers—something easy and quick that suits their needs. They’re not trying to collect 200 pounds or 100 kilos of honey once or twice a season. They want smaller amounts more often.

Jacobsen: How does the device get the honey out in under five minutes without disturbing the bees too much? That’s the interesting part.

Mildren: Yes. So, any beekeeper would know you are still obliged to go in there and look at your bees. You still need to lift the lid off a beehive. You still need to go in there and lift out the frames. You must do that, and a regular part of the process is taking them out, having a thorough inspection, and being clear about the biology of the bee and what’s going on. So, while I say “without any disruption,” we don’t want to ignore that you still need to check on your bees. Our system allows you to work with that normal routine rather than having a big, special harvesting or extraction process. We put our frames in a special frame designed to fit into the same space as a normal frame. This frame has eight sections on it. We call those cassettes. You take this out of a hive when the actual cassette itself is fully capped—it needs to be fully capped with beeswax by the bees—and then we know there’s honey in there, ready to be harvested. The beekeeper can do this easily, either next to the beehive or they can take it inside their kitchen. There’s never been a way, Scott, that’s made this easy to do quickly—inside your kitchen or even next to your beehive. So I’ll show you. Others can’t see this, but our cassette splits in half for simplicity. And you saw before that this outside face was capped. When the honey is ready, those cappings remain there. You must remove the cappings in normal harvesting to get the honey out. In what we do, we leave them on because we’re harvesting from the inside. And we can do that because when we separate the two halves, you’ll note there’s a little opening on the back of each cell. It’s those openings that allow us to harvest the honey. What we do next with those cassettes is we have our benchtop Micro Harvester. We slide these cassettes inside here—and I know you can probably see it yourself. They slide in with the openings facing out, and then in a brief amount of time—literally pressing the button—it’ll spin for 20 seconds. A little bit of honey is still coming from the cassette I’m showing you now.

I harvested this one earlier. In 20 seconds, most of the honey is removed. Normally, there’s a huge process to remove a whole frame of honey, remove those cappings I spoke about earlier, harvest the frame, and filter the honey. And it’s the cleanup step after that—that’s extensive. So that’s slowing down now after 20 seconds. I’ll put that to the side. Feel free to ask more questions. I’m giving you the quick version of that, I guess. But without all those extra steps you must go through, the honey there now is clean and essentially filtered. It doesn’t need filtering because of the way the mechanism works. And that honey is ready to consume right now. That’s minutes instead of hours. And you asked specifically about the disruption to the bees—I put the cassette back in the beehive, even with the beeswax cappings on there. The bees will clean that up in no time and repurpose that beeswax. That’s low friction for the bees, whereas normally, a full box on top is harvested at a time, and that’s a huge disruption to the dynamics of the hive. Now, we’re lucky the bees get on with it, Scott. They get on with it. But where we can minimize that and give them less to have to do and make it easier for them to, I suppose, get back to it afterwards by harvesting smaller amounts and being less destructive to the honeycomb—that’s a much better option for them.

Jacobsen: How do you ensure honey purity and prevent contamination during this process?

Mildren: Cool. Yes, great. That’s a question I would love to answer because we have a strong case with the cassettes. The bees do their work inside the hive. Once this cassette is capped and sealed, you can see the one I’m holding up: untouched honey. It’s up to the beekeeper, but you take this straight from the hive to your harvester. Nothing’s happened to it. It’s not even exposed to the air. There’s no other extraction method that can do that quite the same. You can take this, store it, and keep it wherever necessary.

We’ve got to be mindful of honey crystallization—that can happen over time—but it stays fresh and pure the whole time. When you harvest it, you see it with your own eyes, which is stunning. It looks amazing. And that honey is absolutely at its purest. In the old approach—or the commercial, larger-scale approach to honey production—we don’t know what’s happening through all the steps. A honey producer might provide the honey to a packing shed, which goes through the packing shed arrangements in six to eight steps. As the end consumer, you don’t know if it’s been heat-treated, you don’t know if it’s been blended with other honey, and you may be sold something that’s not quite what it is. You don’t know if additives have been used—like that dreaded high-fructose corn syrup or any other sugary syrup replacement. There’s no fooling this system. You can’t fake it because the honey the bees capped hasn’t touched since it was made in the beehive. It’s truly the bees’ work.

Jacobsen: What feedback have you gotten from early testers, especially from the beekeeping community—particularly the small-batch beekeepers?

Mildren: Yes. So we’ve had it out there, testing for about nine months. Overall, they’re pleased with the operation of the frames and the cassettes. That’s the main bit. We wanted the most feedback on the interaction with the bees because the harvester itself is quite simple. Indeed, the frames and cassettes are, too. But you don’t know until you test with the bees. The user experience from the beekeepers has been that they’re happy to use the frames. We’ve made modifications, upgrades, and improvements based on their guidance. We had initial concerns about the honey volume we could produce from this system. That concern came to Scott because we’re conditioned to think we must have as much production as possible. Since there’s a bit less space to collect honey, the slight reduction in harvestable honey per frame initially concerns some of them. Then they said, “Well, if I can opt for this method, which allows me to harvest more often but with less honey each time, maybe that’s not such an issue.” So that was part of the feedback we got. Occasionally, we also get people asking about plastic—which I’m curious to learn more about from people out there. We get comments like, “How’s the plastic going to hold up?” because we know plastic is used in many forms. There’s a real attitude against plastic being in contact with food; I get that concern. I’m not saying people shouldn’t be concerned—they should be thinking about that. Where I’m interested, Scott, is the opportunity to find alternative materials moving forward other than standard plastics. We use food-grade plastics. We know it takes a little longer for bees to start using plastic initially. Now, in the commercial industry here in Australia, there are 800,000 to 900,000 beehives. Hundreds of thousands would use plastic in their hives, and the bees get along and do well with that. So, we acknowledge the issue, accept that it’s been used successfully many times by many others, and tell people that plastic will take longer for the bees to get accustomed to it the first time. But after that, they won’t know any difference. They need that first nectar flow to recognize that it works well, and then after that, the bees treat it no differently.

Jacobsen: I’m not a bee expert, but I have some questions based on assumptions. One would be: do different species or genera of bees have different ways of building their hives? And if so, would you need different models or design patterns for your cassettes?

Mildren: Good thinking. There are many different types of bees; you’re right. But only a small portion of them are colony-forming bees—like the European honeybee—and they’re the ones that collect honey. Globally, the honey and pollination industries are based around the European honeybee. That’s the bee backyard keepers use as well. There are places in Northern Australia, in our tropical regions, where people use native bees, and that’s a completely different arrangement. What we’ve proposed wouldn’t work with those. I’d be confident that nearly 100% of beekeepers—say 99.999%—use European honeybees. There’ll be a few exceptions, but generally speaking, the European honeybee is the dominant species used in beekeeping. I will mention, though, Scott, that there are differences in hive format and size. While we’ve launched a product that suits the most common beehive system in the world—the Langstroth system—it’s based on size standards. Many people won’t yet be able to use our technology until we create modifications for other hive sizes. We will certainly do that, but we must crawl before running. So, we’re starting with the most common size first.

Jacobsen: And does the simplicity of the format and reduced number of steps also help reduce honey fraud? You know, we were talking earlier about things like adding high fructose—

Mildren: Corn syrup—

Jacobsen: —or whatever into it.

Mildren: Oh yes, it’s horrifying to think. Yes, the answer is yes. But it’s horrifying to think how much fraud is happening out there. It’s staggering. We’re talking about nine out of ten honey samples taken off supermarket shelves in the United Kingdom not passing the test to be classified as genuine honey. Sometimes, that number can reach 100%. Here in Australia, we’re a bit isolated from it, so it’s a much lower number—but it still happens. And how’s this? Apimondia, the largest beekeeping and honey conference on the planet, is held annually in Europe. This year, it’s in September, in Copenhagen. They’ve cancelled their annual honey awards. They cancelled them because they were not confident they could determine legitimate honey. After the fact—after the awards had been analyzed and given out—they later discovered that many of the top 10 samples were fraudulent. Not real, honey.

Jacobsen: It’d be like running the Academy Awards this year and then cancelling it because all the year’s movies turned out to be AI-generated.

Mildren: Isn’t it staggering? And it’s even worse because food is something you put inside your body. You expect it to meet a certain standard. So, we feel that delivering honey from the beehive directly to the consumer—without touching it during the process—gives proper credit to the beekeepers, who do an amazing job producing high-quality, fresh, pure honey. And it gives the consumer what they rightfully expect. We’ve removed all those unnecessary steps. I see it this way, Scott: if we can remove all those steps and package it in a way that feels like the Nespresso machine for honey—that’s the vision I’m working toward. Going from beehive to plate with zero interference. Keeping the quality intact, rewarding the beekeeper for their premium product, and rewarding the consumer for choosing something that truly is high quality.

Jacobsen: We discussed contamination before and touched on fraud, a different issue. I’m not talking about fraud here, but more about things like wax and debris—stuff that might be blended out or filtered but not something you necessarily want in the honey immediately. How do you manage that—a different kind of purity? It’s not the end of the world, but still worth addressing.

Mildren: No, I know what you’re saying. So, with traditional honey harvesting methods, they go through a heavy filtering process, and that’s time-consuming. If you didn’t filter it, you’d end up with large chunks in the honey you buy from the supermarket—I promise you. Given how that process works, you’d have bee bodies, heads of bees, legs of bees, and all sorts of things. In our system, we don’t filter. We take what has been harvested in here. If you could see inside, I’d show you. I’ll take the lid off the base, leave it charging while it’s there, and take it off. I’ll show you—nothing’s better than visually.

Jacobsen: For the transcript, it looks like a big blender, but it’s not large.

Mildren: It’s about the size of a small coffee machine or blender. So here I’ve got the plastic bucket where the honey drains into—it flows nicely down the side. I know it is not easy to describe without seeing it, but I’ll try. We’re looking for big chunks of wax or anything where you’d think, “I wouldn’t want to put that on my toast in the morning.” I don’t know if you can see it, but on the side closest to me, I can see a section of beeswax—about a centimetre long. Looking straight in, I can see one other little chunk of beeswax and maybe a second one. And we’re talking about small pieces you’d mistake for a crumb from the bread. You might take out that one slightly bigger piece—and just to be clear—that’s not from the honey itself. That’s from the edge of the cassette, surrounding the cassette. Any beekeeper—well, it tastes and smells amazing—would not be concerned about that. You wouldn’t do a special filtering step just for that. If you have a big chunk, take it out with a teaspoon. The number of times I’ve harvested and had a big chunk in the honey—I could count on one hand. So, the idea is to make it as simple as possible. It can be that simple because the main source of mess in traditional harvesting comes when people uncap that outer surface. That loosens beeswax, and it gets pulled through in the spinning process and ends up in the honey. But if we’re not removing the cappings in the first place, I promise you—the bees underneath produce clean, clear honey. Completely unfiltered, but with barely an ounce of debris in it. We’re taking that out with only the occasional speck of beeswax coming through. No bee bodies, no dust, no dirt from the air. We eliminate a lot of those issues by doing it this way.

Jacobsen: My final question—something I can ask reasonably: what about ensuring you do not disturb the bees and do not accidentally pull in a bee and injure it?

Mildren: Yes, and that’s quite a simple fix. Firstly, you could always harvest away from the hive—sometimes, that’s the best option. There are certain times of the year when the bees if they smell honey, will be very interested—like, “Yep, I’m going for that.” Other times of the year, they’re not as concerned. That’s why the Micro Honey Harvester has a lid that sits over the top. When it’s time to harvest, the lid should be on to stabilize the central spinning component. If the lid’s on and there are no bees in there, to begin with, then you’re good. If there are bees in the air around you, you can move away a little—walk around the corner, for example. What I prefer to do, and what my kids love, is to take it inside and harvest it in the kitchen—something that cannot be done cleanly, without any effort or large setup, using current traditional methods.

Jacobsen: Excellent, Simon. Thank you for your time today. I appreciate you talking honey with me and teaching me a little bit.

Mildren: Thank you very much, Scott.

Jacobsen: Excellent. I’ll be in touch. Thank you.

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