In preparation for our trip

Make a stakeholder diagram: list all stakeholders in your project and rate their interest (on a scale of 1-3) and their influence on the project's success or failure.
Beekeepers: The success of this project is highly dependent on the beekeepers adapting and sustaining the proposed solution, as well as utilizing the business plan. (The success is also reflective on our abilities, as engineers and designers to find out what their primary needs are)
Middlemen/Distributors: Their influence is vital when thinking about the growth of the beekeeping business, and transferring to a bigger honey industry. This group is aware of what the distributors are looking for in “honey,” and may be a bigger asset when assessing what a “final” honey product should resemble (filtering, packaging, product, etc)
Local Community: For small businesses, such as beekeeping, the local community can be a primary source of income, therefore extremely important to the project and its success. It is dependent on how much honey they consume, the competing prices and their view of rural beekeepers (in terms of purity of honey)
General Public: The general public can be a stakeholder when we think in terms of trends, our environment, and the economy. With the onset of the “green revolution,” there may be a bigger consumer section in need of “organic” products- and the usage of natural resources

What are the 5 greatest challenges to your success? Consider all angles: technical, social, economic, educational, political challenges.
Technical: The difficulty lies in creating a “simplified” product using cheap resources. It is also about editing a pre-existing structure of “bee-keeping” and using new innovative ways for extraction- or a simpler way of “keeping-bee”
Social: Having pre-conceived notions of bee-keeping and having specific habits and methods may prevent the sustainability of a new product. The introduction of something novel is initially always hard and difficult to accept.
Economic: Keeping products cheap and low priced is a challenge, but also trying to gauge the consumers and their selling price.
Educational: Keeping things easy to understand, or creating a thoughtful “training” system that encourages further training, critical thinking, and also sustainability.
Political: Venturing into bigger business in a wider honeybee industry may be more difficult depending on political structures and the ease of entering into a bigger market.

Research to find similar projects others have done, and what they foretell about yours.
The Small Beekeepers’ Development and Research Association Project in Malawi combined the efforts of over 100 beekeeping groups to improve their incomes. They began by legitimizing the trade to create an honest outlet- and also provided capital for storage and transport. (The legitimization of their business created less cheating between traders and beekeepers). They also approached their local district assembly for support to implement more beekeeping within the area- and created a stronger organization of beekeepers for further structure and continual promotion. The three different things to consider were: taking the environment into account, taking the needs of the people into account, and also taking existing technical knowledge into account.Research into the honey market is just as crucial as the devices for beekeeping.

Write down 5 going-in hypotheses about your project.
• The inefficiency in “bee-keeping” may not rest on primarily the honey extractor, but perhaps a dismissed detail within the entirety of the process
• The project and its success will depend largely on the beekeepers need for improvement and change
• A new honey extractor must combine: training of sustaining the product and creating a thoughtful business plan
• Bee keeping is not a business based on just the individual. Creating a strong “community” of bee-keepers is vital for creative exchange – and also physical labor.
• Success is dependent on how well we deduce the problems through our observations on-site

Write down 10-25 questions you hope to answer in Guatemala that will test these hypotheses. What kind of people or places will you visit to answer them? How many interviews will you seek to get credible data?
The large majority of our research would be on-site with the beekeepers and the community of beekeepers who share extractors, and various devices. I think researching/interviewing at least 5-7 beekeepers within that local area will help condense the basic needs of creating a more efficient system. Would also like to interview a honey/product distributor- and also observe the various markets we attend to conduct small interviews with the competitors.
1. What is the step-by-step process of their beekeeping
2. How many people utilizes the extraction device
3. How many hives do each beekeeper own and how much productivity is produced from each hive
4. How and where do they sell their honey?
5. Who are its competitors? How much do they charge for honey
6. How do you measure the purity of the honey?
7. What is the bigger honey market like? Are they in contact with distributors?
8. Where did they learn the technicalities of bee-keeping?
9. How does the local market perceive their honey?
10. How long does the entire process take?
11. How many people are involved in extracting honey
12. Where did they buy their pre-existing structures? How much? And how do they maintain them?
13. How much income do they make with honey
14. Does productivity change by seasons?
15. What are other products that can be made from honey
16. What have they learned through beekeeping (in terms of efficiency)
17. How much would they spend on a new device