Abelo Mating Hive Review

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to take a look at the Abello Mini Mating Hive. So previously when I've been grafting my queens and getting my cells, I've used full either 6-frame or 3-frame nucs in order to get the queens mated. This year I found that's a real drain on the resources within my apiaries, and I've been looking for a different solution in order to get my queens mated but not to kind of drain the resources from my colonies. So I've done a bit of research, and I've— I know loads of different bee farmers and beekeepers use different methods of, of getting their queens mated. So you can have mini mating hives, you can have Apideas, some people do 2-frame nucs. And what I've settled on is this, which is the Abelo Mini Mating Hive. It's the Mini Plus frame system. So in this video, all I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how these boxes come straight out of the packaging, talk to you a little bit about them, the pros, the cons, and how I'm going to run my system. And then next year, what I'll do, once I've got some bees inside them, I'll do a kind of hands-on demonstration on how I actually run my bees through these boxes and how I manage them throughout the year. So first of all, why did I go for the Abello mini mating hive over some of the other options? So I was looking on Alibaba, Chinese website, at these mini mating hives, and it worked out that I could get them for kind of like about £4 each. Spoke to a number of people about these and they really put me off them. They said that they weren't practical and they've kind of bought some and that they're sitting there on the shelf gathering dust. So I always like to kind of take feedback from people who have been through this process before, so they really put me off that type of little mini mating hive. Spoke to them about the Apidaias, and people had really, really good positive things to say about the Apidaias. The problem for me was that they were a little bit expensive, and also I couldn't kind of get a good bulk price on them at the moment. And also a couple of people did have negative experiences on them, and they said that they were a little bit small for overwintering. Now I know some people do overwinter in the Apidaias successfully, But I wanted something a little bit bigger, and that's what led me to this, the Abello Mini Mating Nucs. So the Mini Mating Nucs are very, very different from a lot of the other systems on the market. So what you get is you get basically 4 main components out of the box. You get at the bottom a standalone floor. So most of them come as like a single molded box The Abello one comes as 4 kind of separate components. It is essentially a mini hive. So like I say, you've got the floor at the bottom, you've got 2 ventilation holes there. These pop out, so you can take these out. And then as with all Abello kit, you get loads of little plugs and bits and bobs. You have a solid Um, replacement for the ventilation. So one of the big issues that you have with mini mating nucs is that they can't keep the temperature down in the summer and it leads to the colonies absconding. So in the summer you've got a nice ventilation piece like that, and then in the winter you've got a nice solid piece of poly that you can just plug into that hole to keep them nice and warm throughout winter. So really, really kind of good functional design right from early on. You've got an entrance hole at the front and an entrance hole at the back. Now these mating hives, they're actually 2-way mating hives. So you have an entrance at the front and an entrance at the back. I'll move on to that further and discuss how to manage them with either 1 colony or 2 colony. But for the entrance holes, you have slots like that. That just pops in there. So if you're using it as an entrance, you've got a nice little mini landing board and then a small hole. And then the same for the other side, little entrance boards. So you've got entrance at the front and an entrance at the back. And then when you're not using the entrances, so if you just want to run it just on a single entrance, you have a plug. to plug that hole up like that. So as ever with Abello products, you've got bits in there that make the hive really, really useful, but also you've got bits that you could potentially lose. So what I'm going to do, I've bought 25 of these hives, I'm going to move them all to a separate mating apiary, and I'm just going to have a big kind of plastic box to keep all of these kind of bits and bobs so I don't lose them, because they're really, really useful, especially for kind of the setup that we've got here. But you don't want to lose them, so keep them safe. So that's the floor. It's built out of the same really strong polystyrene that Abelo use in all of their hives, so it's 160 grams per liter steam injection molded polystyrene. It's absolutely rock solid. It really, really is solid. It's going to provide the bees with excellent insulation, but it's very hard wearing as well, so I expect to get an incredibly long life out of these mini mating nucs. So that's the floor. So the next part of this is a mini mating brood box, and as you can see, it is essentially a mini replica of the very well-respected Abello brood box. So 160 grams steam-molded injected polystyrene, plastic inserts with rebates all the way around the edges, and then the kind of reverse rebate underneath. Really, really good for getting your hive tool in there, but obviously you won't need that too much with this. But just provides an excellent long-life product, absolutely rock solid, molded in one piece, plastic inserts, and it comes ready painted. I think they do a blue, a yellow, and a green for the mini mating hive. And then that fits nicely on the floor like that. The frames are the mini plus size frames, so I'll talk a little bit more about frames later on. But these come ready assembled and you get holes in them as well in order for you to string it with stainless steel wire. Very important when using these, you want nice strong frames for the bees to draw them out. But a nice touch that they come ready assembled, so I had all the frames ready assembled, saves me doing it. So if you were going to run that as a single system, you could have your entrance hole at the front and then you could just put your 6 frames in. And run it like that. And that is how I'm going to overwinter these boxes. So I'm going to have 6 frames. And as you can see, do you know what I mean, that's, that's quite a big frame. That's probably about 2/3 the size of a super, once you take into account the extra depth that you've got on there. And then you've got 6 of those. So essentially you've got 6 2/3. You've got about 4 supers worth of bees there, which is a really big size for a mini mating hive. So the kind of question is, is, well, I've moved from 3 and 6 frame full brood nucs over to this. Am I really going to save that much kind of effort or resources by using this? And I think the answer is yes. So what I plan to do, I'm going to keep these ready for the spring, and in the spring I'm going to take a number of the brood boxes and I'm going to stack them up upon each other like this. So I'll probably do that with 5 mini brood boxes. I will then put a package of bees in here and I'll put the feeder on. and feed them and treat them as a single colony until I get all the foundation and the comb drawn out. And then I'll move on to the next step. And the next step for me will be, assume that all of this is covered with bees. So you've got 6 frames covered with bees and there'll be some brood in there as well and a queen. I will remove the queen. I'll push those 3 frames over like that. And then I will take the central polystyrene divider And place that down the middle. So you get a format like that. So it is 2 3-frame mini nucs. And as you can see, you've got your entrance on that side and then you've got another entrance on that side. There's no groove or slot or anything like that for this to fit into. It's just a real good fit all the way to the floor. That's going to seal things off very, very nicely and give you the ability to split that up really, really well. That's what it looks like in the middle. You can see that divider goes all the way down to the floor. It's very neat at the top. It's nice and thick. It's solid. So then we move on to the feeder, and inside the feeder you get all of your bits as we've discussed. So you get 2 polystyrene plugs to close off the entrances. You get 2 ventilated plugs to close off the entrances with some ventilation. You get your 2 landing board/entrance plugs, and then you get your 2 circular plugs to close off the ventilation underneath. So you get loads of bits with it. Um, really nice big feeder. This is one of the reasons that I, I really like this Mini Plus nuc, is you get this solid feeder. And again, 160-gram solid polystyrene, plastic inserts all the way around with a rebate. Rebate on the top as well, and then a really nice stainless steel guard to stop the bees getting into the syrup. And then you've got a good-sized feeder there in order to feed the bees syrup as well. And that's the reason that I really, really like these, is that you can feed the bees that syrup without having to invert stuff. So a lot of them you have to invert, you have to turn things upside down and put them in from underneath. These mini plus nucs, They're very, very similar to the management of a normal colony. Makes it a lot easier for me, means that I can manage them as a bigger-sized colony and hopefully keep that colony going indefinitely and just keep on taking out the resource that I need and not having to add resource back in each time I want to make up a batch of queens. So there's the feeder. Make sure you paint the inside of the feeder with kind of a masonry exterior-grade paint to seal it so it doesn't seep into the poly and mould. And then finally, your lid. So again, always pre-painted, really, really solid lid, nice rebate in the middle, and that goes on like that. So that is the makeup of the hive. This video, do you know what I mean, I'm not doing a review of it just yet. I haven't used these yet. I'm just doing a kind of bit of an unboxing, showing you how they come out of the box, and then we'll do a full detailed review once we get them into the season next year and see how they work. Like I said, my strategy for these next year though is I'm going to fill them up with bees. So bees across all 6 frames and there'll be a queen inside them. So come April, May next year, I'm going to have 6 frames of drawn brood and stores and a queen who's laying in those cells. At that point, I will take the queen out and I will either sell the queen or restock another one of my colonies with it. And that will leave me with 6 frames of brood or stores But more importantly, 6 frames of drawn comb. At that point, I will take my central divider and I will split the colony. I'll do an even split of the colony. I'll put the divider in like that. I'll close up both entrances and then I'll take it to a new site. The bees at the front will emerge and reorientate to this hole, and then the bees at the back will emerge and reorientate to this hole. And essentially you've done a split, you've got 2 separate colonies then. One will fly to the front, one will fly to the back, and they can't intermingle either in the brood box or in the feeder. 2 separate colonies. After an hour of, uh, after getting to the new site, I will add a sealed queen cell to the front and a sealed queen cell to the back, and then I'll raise my queens. At that point, once the queens kind of go out and mate, maybe 2 or 3 weeks later, I'll come back, I'll check to see eggs, and then I'll come back and check to see worker brood. Once I see and I'm happy with worker brood, I can repeat the process again. So I take out the mated queen, I either sell it or I restock another colony, and I can add another Round of cells directly into here. Come the end of the season, what I would do is I would take out one of the queens, but then what I will do is I will take out the divider at the same point, or take out both queens, take out the divider, and then just add one single cell to the entire 6 frames. I will let that queen mate and I will overwinter them in that configuration. So I'm not overwintering them on 3 frames, I'm overwintering them on 6 frames, and that is a really nice size for overwintering, and I'm hoping going down that route means I'll have very, very good success in terms of getting the bees to overwinter successfully, but also means that the buildup will be quick. So come April and May, I can take this divider out, I can split them, and I can add the 2 cells really, really early on. And most importantly, I'm not pinching bees from my production colonies or my nucs. In order to do my queen rearing. So that's how I'm going to manage it. Of course, I will do a full video showing you exactly how I do that step-by-step process, so make sure that you're subscribed to the channel and then you can follow our activities. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.