ABELO ADJUSTABLE METAL HIVE STAND REVIEW

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to show you what I think is the best hive stand on the UK market. So hive stands come in all shapes and sizes. You know that I like my plastic hive stands. People use normal wooden pallets, blocks with pieces of wood on them, they build their own stands, collapsible ones, you name it. There's tons of different styles and sizes of hive stands on the UK and international market. What I'm going to show you today though is, in my view, by far and away the best hive stand that money can buy. So Damien sent me this product free of charge. I've put it together here. I'm going to run you through all of the features in this video, but like I say, I think it really is a standout hive stand on the UK market. Now I know what you're thinking— how much weight can it hold? So the first thing we're going to do is put me on it, and I weigh about 105, 106 kilos, so I put on a little bit of festive weight. It's easily holding me. I can kind of jump around on it. You can get this— you can see the length of wood that you can have on it there. You're pretty much restricted on this by the, uh, the strength of the wood. So what I add in here is 2 pieces of normal, not tanalized, 2x3 timber. And that can easily take my weight. So you can imagine with this, if you had it on the full length, you could probably get 4 hives on it. They might be a little bit stressful in the middle of the winter, but I'd say as a safe bet, you can go for 3 hives on here. That's what I'm going to run these ones with, 3 hives, and just cut the timbers down to size. But as you can see, I'm not— there's no tricks. I weigh quite a lot, and that is more than capable of taking my weight. Nothing wrong with the metal or the wood in this design. So there's no getting away from the fact these are expensive hive stands. They cost about £80 for the 2 sets there, but you can get between 3 and 4 hives on a single set. So there's no getting away from that. They are very, very expensive, but it's due to the manufacturing techniques and the material that they're made from. So they're a full metal build. These are welded items. They're put together, they're absolutely solid, and then they're Double dip galvanized, so they're not going to rust, they're not going to break on you. These, you've got these for the long run. They're going to probably outlast you. You might need to every now and again replace the wood. That's the thing that's going to break on these. So I, I would recommend if you can go for a tanalized timber if you can get it. I've just gone with a standard 2x3, but I'll upgrade that later on in the season. Now what makes this design so much better than any of the other designs in the market? It's fully bespoke and it allows you to lift it up and lift it down to get it to a suitable working height for you. And the way that you do that, it's really simple. You just lift out this key here and then you can lift it up. So it's as simple as that. You go around, you do that on all of the 4 corners, and then that lifts the hive stand up to a suitable working height for you. So that's it up at its absolute maximum height, but the beauty of this hive stand is that you can balance each of the legs independently from the rest of them. So you don't need to go and level the ground, you level the hive stand. So at the moment I've got a lot of wobble because I've got a high point in this corner, so all I need to do is go and adjust that peg down one rung and then I get a perfectly balanced hive. So now I've got them different settings on each leg, and I've got that perfectly balanced. Now you just need to be aware, the higher you have this hive stand, the less stable it's going to be when you haven't got any weight on it. As soon as you put some weight on it though, that's going to become really, really stable. Obviously, the lower that you go down, the lower the center of gravity and the more stable it becomes. So as you can see there, you've easily got enough space at this length to get 2 hives on. I'd only recommend going one further than that. I wouldn't go for any more than 3 per set of legs just for weight and stability issues. But as you can see, how nice and high is that hive stand? For people like me, a little bit taller than average, I find unless I've got it up a good 450mm off the ground, I get issues with my back. So I like a really nice high brood box like this, means I'm not constantly bending over giving myself a bad back. Now another great feature of this hive stand is the fact that it's got splayed legs. So instead of having legs that go down standard and straight like that, they're splayed out at an angle. And that's a real benefit having that because it gives you real increased stability when there's any wind or any movement. Now these have got a really nice splay to them as well. It's not just a slight splay, it's a real strong splay, and that's going to give you excellent stability in all but the most harshest conditions. Another thing that I really like about this hive stand is the fact that the legs have plates at the bottom. That means it's not going to go and sink into any ground unless you've got very, very soft ground. It should spread that weight accordingly, and it shouldn't dig into the ground too much. So the next thing to note is when you're putting this together, obviously all you do is you pop the legs in, put the pins in, get it to the right height, and then you've just got a thumb turn there, and you just need to get a ratchet on that and get it nice and tight. That holds the wood in place, and then everything else is just supported through the weight being on it. Just need to make sure they're nice and tight though, so then the wood's not going to slip out. So there you go, that's it. There's not much more to say about a hive stand like this. I'm trying to condense these reviews down as much as I possibly can. All I would say though is I think these are the best hive stands in the market. I'm not saying that because Damien from Abello paid me to say it. He's not paid me for the review. He sent me these for free, but I genuinely do think they're kind of head and shoulders above the rest. And what I will say is you pay for that premium as well. These are by far and away the most expensive hive stand on the market as well. They're really not cheap. But if you're the kind of person that's got 2 or 3 hives in your back garden and you want a nice looking hive stand that's not a big stack of plastic pallets like I normally use here, and you want something that's fully adjustable to the ground, and you want something that you can have up nice and high so you can deal with it so you've not got a bad back, then I just don't think there's Anything else on the market that could compete with these. They look nice, they're going to last forever, they give you the flexibility, and they're strong and durable. So what I will do is I'll stick up a link at the bottom of this video just so you can click on it and go and buy these hives direct from Abello. Like I say, they're around £80 including the VAT, but you really won't be disappointed with these. These are a really good hive stand. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.