We've Won a Women in Innovation Award — And We're Building a Better Clearer Board
The News We've Been Sitting On
If you read our July newsletter, you might remember us mentioning "something rather exciting" that we weren't quite ready to share. Here it is: Hive-Five has been named a winner of the Innovate UK Women in Innovation Awards 2026.
We're one of 61 award winners chosen this year, out of a record 1,590 applications — the largest Women in Innovation cohort in the programme's ten-year history. Along with the recognition comes a £48,000 grant and a year of tailored business support, which we'll be putting straight into developing our second product: a new clearer board.
Why a Clearer Board, Specifically
If you've kept bees for any length of time, you know the moment. The honey's ready, the supers are heavy, and now you need to persuade several thousand bees to leave the box you're about to carry away. However you do it — a Porter bee escape, a rhombus clearer board, a chemical repellent, or the shake-and-brush method — it's one of the most disruptive points in the beekeeping year for the colony, and one of the fiddliest for the beekeeper.
We designed the Multi-Guard because we kept seeing beekeepers reach for gaffer tape and ill-fitting entrance blocks to solve problems that deserved a proper piece of kit. The clearer board is the same story. Over the next year, funded through the award, we'll design, prototype and field-test a clearer board that clears bees from supers with less stress, less strain and less disturbance to the colony — built with input from working beekeepers, the same way the Multi-Guard was.
How We'll Build It
We'll be working with All CNC, a manufacturer based just down the road from us in Tunbridge Wells, Kent — keeping it UK-made, same as everything else we do. The plan is to prototype and field-test with real beekeepers over the coming months, ahead of the 2027 honey season, before we move into full production.
Good Company
We're not the only beekeeping entrepreneur in this year's cohort. Congratulations also to Maggie Gill of PHIRA-Science in Carmarthenshire, who's developing a climate-adaptive treatment to protect honeybees from parasitic mites. It's a good reminder that there's a lot of quiet innovation happening in beekeeping right now, often led by people solving problems they've lived with themselves.
In Our Own Words
"Winning a Women in Innovation Award is a huge vote of confidence — not just in me, but in the idea that beekeeping equipment can be designed around what beekeepers actually struggle with, and what the bees need too. Too many people take up beekeeping and don't stick with it, often because the basics are harder than they need to be, and that difficulty often shows up as stress on the colony. This funding means we can properly design, build and test the clearer board with real beekeepers before it ever reaches a shelf, so it genuinely reduces disturbance for the bees as well as the workload for beekeepers — which is exactly how we like to build things at Hive-Five."
— Natalie Armstrong, Founder, Hive-Five
Thank You
To everyone who's bought a Multi-Guard, sent us feedback, or just read this newsletter every month — thank you. This award is as much a reflection of the beekeeping community around Hive-Five as it is of us. We'll share progress on the clearer board here on the blog as prototypes take shape.
Happier beekeeping,
Natalie, Colin and Michael