Beegin was started in 2015, by Ivan Leroy Brown, as a Master's research project, in the Department of Industrial Design, at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. The goal at the start of the project, which remains the vision of Beegin, was to contribute towards food security indirectly by creating opportunities for socio-economic development and income generation; and directly by helping protect our most valuable pollinators. It was important that  whatever system I developed enabled beekeepers to increase their honey production and minimize their costs, whilst allowing emergent beekeepers (farmers and novices) to enter into the industry easily.

The project actually began by looking for opportunities for appropriate technologies that could benefit small-scale, urban farmers in Johannesburg. In interviews severall farmers indicated that they would like to keep bees, but that they were limited by their access to the expensive equipment and training required. That led to talks with beekeepers and equipment manufacturers who explained why the cost of the beekeeping was starting to outweigh the profits (see Barriers to Beekeeping above), along with all the problems with the standard equipment. The beekeepers agreed that there was huge potential for socio-economic development through beekeeping, but that it would require solving the most glaring issues first.

Brown set about researching beekeeping, starting at the beginnings of bee domestication and working through every important development that influenced, and led to, our modern beekeeping practices, systems and technology. The research began to focus on the beehive as a central node, generating a comprehensive annalysis of contemporary and past beehive designs. From this a criteria for the design and use of beehives was developed that would guide the design research and help identify new possibilities for improvement. The Human-Centered Design research approach demanded participation from experts, and so, once a significant level of understanding had been reached, Brown sought out seasoned beekeepers to measure the theory against the realities.

What he found was that there seemed to be a central and standardised system for beekeeping that everyone agreed on - the Langstroth beehive, with its frames and chambers. However, for each beekeeper there was a different set of beliefs, systems, modifications, improvements and innovations that they had either chosen, or been forced, adopt - in order to cope with their specific circumsatnces. From harvesting to inspections, locking to protection, frames to bars, queen-manipulation to insulation, maintenance to manufacture and so on, every beekeeper had their own unique way of keeping their bees alive and well.

The beehive design criteria highlighted several thematic areas that required improvement such as cost, durability, production speed, ease of production, insulation, harvesting system, pest exclusion and material. The last theme was a fundamental design feature that had an affect on much of the rest of the beehive. Wooden beehives were relatively cheap, but they would not last long, were at insulating and protecting the bees from threats and required expensive machinery to make properly. Plastic-foam (polystyrene) were also cheap, but even less-durable than wood, requiring protective paint for UV protection, and while they created good insulation there had been issues with conddensation and internal humidity. Composite-plastic beehives were often engineered to solve the humidity issue, but had been found to create electrostatic discharge problems (resulting in absconding swarms), and at the high price these hives carried they would not last long with fires and bears around. The plastic beehives also required specialised manufacture in industrial locations.

This began the search for an alternative material. After several rounds of ideation (creating inumerable solution concepts), user-feedback and iteration the design of a new type of beehive emerged. The idea of using concrete as a material came up along with some other concepts, but in discussion with experts it was selected as the material with the most potential. The only issue was the weight. Some further research led to lightweight-concrete, and that opened up the design research to pursue this new direction.

At this point Brown developed an initial, prototype beehive and production system. The first concrete beehive was as close to the standard wooden Langstroth beehive as possible, with similar wall thickness, chamber design and shape. The intention was to see if, with the same design, the concrete performed better than a wooden hive along the selected beehive design criteria. The beehive and the moulding tools were batch produced for intensive field-testing. A group of 5 small-scale farmers and 5 expert beekeepers were selected to make and use the beehives over a season and provide feedback on the system.

The outcome of the field-testing was positive. Although the prototype beehives and moulding tools had several obvious issues, the swarms they housed performed exceptionally, outdoing the comparative wooden hives by as much as 200% (measured in honey yield). The production and cost of the concrete beehives was shown to be much easier and cheaper than the wooden versions. In short concrete was shown to achieve higher desirability along most of the criteria when compared to wood or plastic. The data pointed to the potential success of lightweight concrete as a beehive material, given that all of the issues identified during the testing could be solved. These were issues like the slow and difficult moulding process due to the complicated steel shutter moulds. Or the fragility of the concrete components that were trying to mimic the design of wooden counterparts too closely with sharp corners and thin sections.

By grouping all of the issues into categorical design fields the design could be delineated and restructured around a hierachical system of designing the ultimate concrete beehive and production system. These areas are summarised below: