how-a-6-pack-of-beer-inspired-this-beekeeper8217s-sweet-invention

How A 6-Pack Of Beer Inspired This Beekeeper’s Sweet Invention

Kristy Allen of The Beez Kneez on her Honey Cycle.The Beez Kneez

Kristy Allen, a beekeeper in Minneapolis, has built a thriving business doing what she loves best: Caring for bees.
She maintains hives, sells honey and teaches intensive beekeeping classes, all while maintaining environmentally sustainable practices. Her business, The Beez Kneez, pulls in some $200,000 a year in annual revenue. “When I started in 2010, we just didn’t anticipate that kind of growth, and it’s not waning,” Allen told The Story Exchange recently in this 18-minute podcast, Let’s Hear It For Honeybees.
But what Allen is most proud of is a device she has invented: the Beez Kneez Honey Cycle. Many beekeepers use a hand crank to extract honey from the comb. It looks “kind of like a butter churner that sits on the side of the machine,” Allen says. “It’s really awkward to use.”
A few years ago, Allen thought there must be a better way. An avid biker, she had initially started The Beez Kneez as a pedal-powered honey-delivery service. She had dressed like a bee — the costume included antennas and striped socks — and biked around Minneapolis, dropping off honey deliveries to restaurants, food co-ops and other clients.

So she went to her bike mechanic — a friend who has a “brilliant engineering mind” — and told him about the challenge of extracting honey by hand. “I said, ‘Help me make this pedal powered,’” she says. “And so I literally gave him a six-pack of beer, a

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the-invention-of-the-modern-dog-review-our-long-obsession-with-canine-design

The Invention of the Modern Dog review – our long obsession with canine design

“Why are mongrels a dying breed?” Jilly Cooper wondered out loud in 2013. She might equally have asked “Whatever happened to pedigrees?” She was referring to the fact that the dogs you meet these days are seldom pure-bred or mutt, but tongue-twisting mash-ups: labdradoodle, puggle, cavapoo, zuchon, beaglier. The emergence of these artful hybrids in recent years is the result of the marketplace’s demand for an animal designed with human needs in mind: loyal but not clingy, confident yet chilled, fluffy as a puffball but mercifully inclined to hang on to its own hair. And exactly the right size to fit into your car.
Dogs, then, are largely humanmade manufactures, their changing shape and proliferating forms the consequence of fantasy, hope and greed (a good crossbreed with all its papers now goes for as much as its pedigreed parents). Selective breeding is how it’s done, the careful matching of mates in order to produce puppies with exactly the desired characteristics. It’s both incredibly simple – dogs are generally delighted with whatever blind date you’ve set up for them – and profoundly powerful. For within just a few generations, and bear in mind that a dog generation may be as little as six months, you can change the shape of a snout or tame a nasty temper. Within a few more generations you could, in theory, have invented a whole new breed.
In this fascinating book, three leading historians of science explore the origins of what they call the “modern” dog. For millennia, canine companions were roughly sorted into types suited for certain tasks. There were big dogs to pull people out of the snow and little dogs to turn the spit, medium-sized dogs to run after sheep and “toy” dogs to sit on ladies’ laps. But with the dawning of the 19th century came a new desire to count,

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