Abelo Poly Hive Review – What’s the Best Beehive for UK Beekeepers?

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, and I'm here today to review the new Abelo polyhive. Now, I was kindly gifted this by Damien from Abelo over the Christmas period to have a look at, see what I thought of it, and maybe add it to my collection of polyhives. And I have to say, it's definitely the best polyhive I've seen on the market to date. So what we're going to do is we're going to have a look at some of the features of the hive, we're going to compare it to the old previous version of the Abelo polyhive Have a look at some of the improvements and what they've done differently, and compare it to some of the other poly hives and wooden hives that I have here, and just show you some of the differences and some of the features. So we'll start from the top, looking at the new roof. Now the first thing you notice about the roof is they've put a little nifty indent in it to allow you to kind of rest your hive strap on. Now, now that's one of the Suyenti roofs that I use, and they're relatively similar. It doesn't have any of the functionality that the Abello has, but it does have a bit of a flaw, which is when I put the hive straps on, and I like to ratchet them really, really tight, you get indentations in the poly either end. And now it's not affecting the structural kind of stability of it, um, but it's a little bit unsightly. And I guess if you can kind of mitigate that happening, then why not? So they've done that, which is good. One of the other things that you notice in the, in the roof here is that they have these 2 entrance holes. Now I find these incredibly useful. At first when I looked at these polyhives, I didn't like all the holes in them, and I thought, oh, here we go, stupid little entrances and little beekeepers saying you need to do this, you need to do that, um, and it's more of a fad as opposed to anything actually quite useful. And then having had the original poly Uh, Abello polyhives and use them. They're so handy. So what I use them for, um, and they have the same in the face of the supers as well, you can see there, that way around, they have them in the brood box and the supers as well. What I find these entrances really, really useful for is kind of doing swarm manipulations. Um, so if you, if If you're kind of going through your brood and you find some, find some swarm cells and you want to do a demarée or something, then you can use these to create a natural split within the hive. So when I do a demarée, I'll take the brood box and I'll lift it up above the supers, um, with an additional brood box underneath. So I've kind of done a bit of an artificial swarm. And then if I didn't have these entrance entrances within the hives, I'd have to create some sort of other entrance. So I'd use one of the different boards that allows you to open it up. So it's all just kind of having to have extra kit, but you can have it with a little plug like this. Um, so yeah, so that seemed like one of the— my first review of it was maybe that's a bit of a fad, and actually coming to have to use these previously, they're actually really helpful. Um, so yeah, so looking what other features we've got in the roof, it, it has space underneath it. So previously it had a bit of a telescopic roof, which I know is an American term, where the roof kind of went down over the box like that. So they've done away with that now and they've put a recess in. So there's a 20mm recess around the outside like that that fits snugly onto the crown board, so you don't get any slippage whatsoever. That's a nice neat feature. What that allows, with the fact that it doesn't kind of go down over the hives, is that you get this space in here. And what Abella have done is they've cleverly added an integrated feeder. So this feeder comes with the hive, and you get some lovely kind of ventilation blocks and different poly plugs and bits and bobs that enable you, if you don't want some of these features, to plug them up. So they really are kind of covering all bases with this hive. I'm very happy with it. So go to the crown board. I'll come back to the feeder. So the crown board is one of one of the biggest changes that they've made to this hive. So previously they had a crown board and it had 5 holes, and not a lot of people understood what those 5 holes were for. And I think, well, they didn't, they didn't tend to use them that often. I know when I had the previous Abello crown board, I didn't use the 5 holes to what they were used for. So apparently what it was supposed to do is for overwintering mini nucs in a kind of 4x4— sorry, a 2x2 configuration to give you 4 little mini nucs. Under a single crown board. Commonplace in the US, but I've never used it like that, and I think this version of the crown board is a significant improvement over the previous one. So the features of the crown board are you have kind of plastic mating faces like that. They're very solid, they're good for getting your hive tool in and kind of prising the hives apart. You've got a male rebate around the edge there which fits into the Rebate that's on the poly roof, give you a nice kind of stable hive. And then the additional features they've got here is you have an entrance hole which would fit, uh, you'd have your frames underneath and then an entrance hole which would enable the bees to come up through there, and then a feeding hole. So when you put that on the hive like that, the feeder sits directly into that slot, and it's like I say, it's like a real kind of rebate in there for that to move, so there's absolutely nowhere else That can go. The feeder is good. It's a plastic Ashford feeder, 2.5 litres, and the fact that that's bundled in with the hive is great. It means you don't have to purchase an additional feeder for the hive. If I was being overly critical, it's a little bit small for my liking. I like to use— just trying to see if I can find one— no, one that aren't in use. I like to use the Suyenti feeders, so they're 14.5 litres. And that's just my own personal preference. It means that I can go in at the end of the season, fill it up once, give the bees 14.5 litres of syrup, and then I generally don't have to feed them anymore again after that. I might top it up again later in the year, but it means no more than 2 top-ups. With this, you're talking a lot more than 2 top-ups, so it's a bit small, but comes free, um, with the hive, so I'm not complaining. What is also good with this though is that it's actually compatible with their Polyfeeders. So they do big polyfeeders the same size as the crown board, and then the bees can come up through this hole here. If you take it out, that just pops out, and then you've got a nice central feeding hole like that. So if you wanted to use a big feeder, you can use it. It's not bundled with the hive, you have to pay for it separately, but at least it's fully compatible with that. It would have been a gross error if you were completely limited to that feeder. Um, it would have caused real issues. So obviously Abella put a lot of thought and work into this hive and come up with a very neat solution. Um, so if you don't like any of those features though, what's great is they've given you the plugs. So if you just want a solid crown board, you put your plugs in and there you go, you've just— you've got your solid crown board. And again, all of that's supplied with the hive. Um, and a lot of people do like a solid, a solid hive board. Like, people are really moving away from the crown boards where you have the porthole escapes and you have to block them up. Like, I've never found they've worked, but they're constantly sold by a lot of the big suppliers. And all of my other crown boards are just solid crown boards, and then for feeding, I just use a poly feeder directly on a queen excluder. So again, it's a really multifunctional hive, this. I mean, even just kind of getting down through the roof and the crown board, there's tons of features in there, tons of Possibilities and different ways to use the hive, which is really, really helpful. Um, moving on to the super, pull it apart, we've already ratcheted. Not a huge amount of change from the super, but to be honest, their previous iteration of the hive didn't need much of a change. Um, again, you've got one entrance hole, which is all you need. On the previous one, I believe there was one on each side, and you didn't need one on each side, you just needed the one. So that would have kept the cost down. One of the big, big changes to this though now is that you have handholds on all sides. On the previous iteration, you only had it on the 2 sides, and I've— it really frustrates me when suppliers do that because you go, you go to kind of come down to collect it and then it's just all smooth and you can't pick it up. So this way you can pick it up from any side and change it, which is great. Inside of the hive, as before, you've got your plastic runners on either side. Sometimes I find that the water can pool a little bit in here, but the way that I've found to resolve that is if you just cut a little nip off the edge there, and the same on the other side, then the water will kind of drain down towards one of those channels and channel out of the hive. It's not a big problem at all. Right, let's see what else we've got. So the brood box, much the same as the super really, it's just kind of, it's a very, very similar design. You've got the same one entrance hole just on that side which pops out easily, great for swarm manipulations. Another thing I should mention about the super is you can potentially use that entrance on a really good honey flow. I found that if you kind of have that additional top entrance open on a honey flow, it has to be a really good strong hive, you don't want any wasps getting in there, but it just gives them another way to come in and come out. Um, so that's very good. But like I say, yep, the, the actual brood box there, there's not a huge amount of change from the previous iteration. It solves 2 of the big problems though. One, it's got the handholds now on all 4 sides. Um, and yeah, great, great. Like, the, the things that I really like about the Abelo Polyhive are the fact that it's very solid poly. You compare that to some of the Suente stuff that's 100 grams per liter polystyrene. It's a lot softer, it's got a lot more give to it, whereas the Abello is 160 grams per liter and it's actually steam molded as opposed to injection molded, which means it's far more durable. One of the other big things to mention about the Abello hive in general is the fact that it comes ready assembled. Now this is a real— it's a big time saver. I know I mentioned in previous videos that I'm not too fussed about the end up having to put them together. But there is something really nice about kind of getting a hive and it being delivered and it just being ready to go. It definitely saves a lot of time, um, and I think it kind of— the fact that it's so rigid, you're never working it apart and the edges are coming and you have to kind of push it back together again. Like, I do feel that you get a long, long life out of these Abello hives. I'm very happy with that. Now the floor is another area where they really have kind of made quite a big difference. So previously you had a rather extended landing board, and I don't like landing boards at all. I prefer my hives to be completely confined to the exterior footprint of the actual brood box. And as I've done on previous videos, I actually use a lot of homemade wooden underfloor entrances and find that they serve my purposes very well— stop mouse Hacks, um, and stop wasps getting in, and they're cheap. So I like my wooden underfloor entrances, but I have to say, this is a very, very solid and well-put-together hive, uh, floor. So like I say, the landing board has been completely reduced in size, so it's about 15mm deep now, as opposed to, I think it was about kind of 50 or 60mm deep before. Now that gives you additional advantage if you're a migratory beekeeper. And you're putting a lot of these hives on trailers, it means you can probably, if you've got a big enough trailer, get an extra row in there. And if you're stacking them 3 high, it could be up to an additional 18 hives, which is massive for these migratory beekeepers. The mesh that they use on here, they use a very kind of solid mesh, and it's stainless steel, and all of the edge pieces here are stainless steel as well. So a lot of the stuff that I use is galvanized, and it does, it does Begin to corrode, it does begin to rust, and that— it doesn't necessarily cause issues, but it's just a more premium product. Like, I expected that to last a very, very long time, and it's really well fixed in place. I've had it so many times on my Sorenti floors, and it's something that I need to resolve this year before it happens again, that they're not stuck down properly. So when I put the pins in, they're not perfectly there, and then I come to move the hives, I think I've got them all strapped up and sealed, and there's a big gap in the floor, and they come out. And if I haven't got my veil on, I tend to take quite a few stings and do a lot of cursing. So what else we got here? We've got the sliding tray. Now, this is really good. A lot of the other floors I see, the sliding trays, they're not very well designed at all, and you have to really push them to get them in. There's no handholds on them. If you can see from this one, It's really easy, just comes out nicely. It's got the handheld on it. Get it up there. It's just, just a little touch like that, it just makes it a lot easier. Straight back in like that, completely sealed. Very happy with that. So just, just running back through it again then, um, you've got your floor. There's nothing bad I can really say about the floor. Absolutely happy with it. I wouldn't change anything on there at all. There is a very small landing board on there, but I could— I can live with a 15mm landing board, um, so I wouldn't change anything about that at all. The brood box, pretty well, it is the best brood box on the market in my opinion. Um, I know a lot of people would use wooden brood boxes. I've converted everything to poly now. I find that up here in North Wales, if you want to get the bees through winter and not give them a ton of stores to work over winter, and then you want that real rapid expansion in the spring, poly is the way forward. And they're kind of comparable in cost to wooden hives anyway, so it's not a case of you're paying a premium for a poly product. Ready assembled, ready painted, plastic mating faces, plastic runners, steam moulded, absolutely solid. So yeah, Very, very happy with the brood box. If there was one, and I'm really kind of scraping the barrel here, but if I had to give it one criticism here, well, naturally, well, I won't. I won't criticize the brood. I'll save it for the supers because it's more applicable to the supers. Okay, supers. Right. So these are pretty much carbon copies of the brood box, but they're just obviously the shallow national size. Now, my one criticism of the supers is there's nowhere to put castellations. So if you had a wooden box, you could just pin your castellations in. You might start off with an SM4 frame, a self-spacing, get your frames drawn out, and then when you come to using it as a honey super, you, you want to get that wider frame spacing in there to make uncapping a lot easier. Now I like to go down to a 9-frame on a, on all of my supers, so I do that by using castellations. Now you can do it, you can set them by eye But then it means that you need to get your hive stands very level. I've not got time for that. If you look around my apiary, my hive stands are all over the place. I call them hive stands, it's just pallets that I chucked on the floor. So if you want to just self-space them by eye and give yourself a bit of a gap for them to draw the combs out, you can do that. But I find they just slide all over the place, so I don't like that. So what I find myself using is castellations. So I will use I start off— all my frames are SM4 DM4, so they're Hoffman-style self-spacing. And then once I've got them drawn out, I'll move them over to a castellation and I'll go over to a 9-frame. And on the wooden hives, that's pretty easy. Wooden hives is relatively easy. It means I have to take the castellations off and put them back on, and it's a bit fiddly with nail guns and nails. With the Suyentes, I didn't realize this at first, and I'm not sure even if they've designed it that way, Okay. But the way the plastic runners sit, you can actually fit a castellation down the back of them, and it's perfectly aligned with the top of the hive when using bottom bee space. So I find it really helpful that you can just kind of draw all your frames out, get another super, pop the castellations in, move the frames over one by one into a 9-frame configuration, and put it back. And then I use that as my honey super like that, and I can change it back at the end of the year. It's It is, it's a very neat design. Now on the Abello, there's no option for that, so I'm not entirely sure how you would use these with the castellation. But not everyone uses castellations. There's plenty of other options out there. There's little plastic spacers for your, for your frames that people use, and they work well. I tend to want to kind of steer away from any unnecessary plastic, and if you can get away with just using a metal castellation, I think that's the better option. But like I say, that really is me kind of scraping the barrel for a criticism on that super. My view is that's the best floor in the market, it's the best brood box on the market, and it's the best super on the market. Second super the same. Right, so going back to the crown board then. I like the crown board. I think, I think they tried to work out all of the possible issues that beekeepers could have and solve them all with this crown board. But there is, there's one kind of underlying grumble that I have, and I'll mention it when I'm giving the summary of the whole hive. And I think that's a result of them trying to fix all of these issues with it. But in terms of actual kind of technical functionality, I think it's a very, very good crown board. It sits flush on the super like that. Um, it's got options to feed fondant if you wanted to put a big slab of fondant on there and then put the roof over on top of that. I mean, you've got your 50mm space to cut your fondant in half and do that. I like to feed big slabs of fondant, so I can do that on this board. I've got my plugs if I want to just— if I want to feed them up over winter and then just leave them with the stores that they've got. I don't want them coming up into the feeder or the roof. I can do that so everything's nicely sealed off. Take them back out. Take them back out. I can use this feeder, slots right in like that. There's no slipping, which is good if you've not got perfectly leveled hive stands. Um, great for kind of, uh, feeding a limited amount of syrup. Quite a nice space for keeping all the little bits for the hive as well, which is what I'll definitely be doing with this one. Let's put that back on. And then back to the roof. Like, this is one of the biggest changes, I think, of the high of the roof. Like, I really didn't like the previous roof from Abello. I thought it was too big. I didn't like the way it overhung. I just thought it was a bit of a waste of material. And where I'm struggling for space, like in the back of the pickup truck, I try and like double hives up in there, or I want a trailer. I don't— I want to kind of limit the height of the hive as best as I possibly can, and I think they've done that very well with this whilst kind of maintaining an area to give you fondant. But I think the biggest development on this is the fact that they put the entrance holes in. That, that really, really helpful for me. That gives you the option of doing vertical splits within a single hive. Do you know what I mean? Putting just a kind of solid crown board in the middle, move the super up to the top, move a brood box up to the top, give yourself a new entrance like that, and you can do whatever you want. Um, like if you're looking to kind of remake, uh, requeen your hives with a, with a queen cell, you can do that, and you can do it with kind of like limited impact on the hive's foraging ability. So I think that's a real kind of nifty addition. Like I say, the strap Yeah, it's a nice thing to add. I don't think it adds a huge amount of functionality to the hive, but why not? It's not going to cost them a huge amount more. They pay for the mould anyway. Putting the hive together is pretty easy. Like, it relies on good mating faces of plastic, and with all my hives, I like to ratchet them really tight. So with the hive comes this little strap I can't remember what these ones are called, but I don't like these straps. You just, you just can't get enough tension in the strap. So although you can get it kind of tight enough to stay there, which I mean, that just kind of moves around like that. So it's not, not good enough for what I want. But if it's just sitting in your back garden, you're not moving it around, it's absolutely fine. Um, if I was going to use these kind of for migratory beekeeping, taking them to the heather or rape, I'd I'd use one of my normal ratchet straps and get it properly tight. It would probably damage the poly a little bit, but that's, that's the price you pay for getting it tight. So yeah, so that's the new Abello Polyhive. That's available now. I believe it's £145 for the fully painted version, £125 for the non-painted version. Um, a bit of a summary in terms of where I think it sits in the market. The grumble that I have with it is I think it's probably a little bit expensive for me at £145 fully painted. If I was going to get these, I'd definitely go with a non-painted version. I don't like painting hives, it's really boring, but when you're doing it on a big scale like that, if you're buying 100 of these and you're saving £20 per hive for painting, you're saving £2,000. So to do a few hours painting, it's probably going to cost you £50 worth of paint. There's a lot of money to be saved in doing that. I also think that they've added a huge amount of features to this hive, a lot of the features that I really like, but some of them I could probably do without. Like, I could do without the feeder, I could probably do without the crown board personally, but I know other people do like the crown boards. When I'm looking at buying hives, I'm, I'm always looking at what's, what's the best deal I can possibly get. And with this hive, there's so many features in there, and the fact that it's steam molded as opposed to injection molded It's all adding and increasing that price. So I think in terms of other polyhives on the market, in terms of technical functionality and capacity, the Abelo Hive, by far and away the best hive, polyhive on the market. I really don't think anything comes close to it at the moment. Um, but then if you started looking at it versus, versus the competitors and you were really trying to kind of penny pinch and save a bit of money, I might, I might go somewhere else. Now I know Abello are always kind of happy to look at discounts for large orders, so if you are looking at kind of like 20, 30, 40 hives, speak to Damien at Abello and I'm sure he'll do you a good deal on these. They also run kind of good discount codes throughout the year, so I've noticed that with Abello. If you kind of look at New Year or Black Friday or other times throughout the year, they often do 10% off. So you can get these painted for kind of £130, you can get them not painted for around of £110, and then once you've taken that discount off, the pricing element almost goes out the window and they're pretty much the same price as the competitors. And then if you're comparing them on an even cost basis, then it's an absolute no-brainer. So thanks to Damien for sending me this one to have a look at. I'm very happy with it. I'm kind of itching to get some bees into it and give it a real kind of live review. But as you can see, the bees, they're tucked up for winter at the moment, nice and quiet. And that's about it. So thanks for tuning in. Please have a look at our Twitter account, our Instagram account, our Facebook account. Please subscribe to the YouTube channel. We're going to do lots of, lots more of these videos. We're looking at doing one a week. Videos that are upcoming, we're going to have a look at our labelling machine, we're going to have a look at our new stainless steel automatic uncapping machine, We're going to have a look at our creamer. We're going to have a look at our centrifuge, our honey extractor. We're going to take a look at kind of all the way that the different machinery interacts with one another, and I think that'll do for the time being. So thanks again for watching, and I'll see you soon.