Apitec Queen Incubator Review

Today I'm going to give you the first look at my Apotek queen cell incubator from Romania. Right, so first off, why do we need a queen cell incubator? And I reckon 99% of the people watching this video don't need one. However, we are moving really hard into queen rearing this year. We bought a fixed incubator that we're going to run at home, and we're going to use that to incubate queen cells and to allow the virgins to be released into the incubator. We'll also do some introduction of live cells, so fully grafted and capped cells into colonies as well. But it gives us the flexibility to move queens from location to location, and that was the reason that I wanted to buy myself an incubator, but more importantly than that, a portable queen cell incubator. Now I looked high and low within the UK to find something that was ready-made. I just wanted to buy it, a queen cell incubator. I don't know, maybe 50 cells, 100 cells, something like that. Couldn't find anything. There is nothing on the UK market. If you're good at electrics, if you've got an interest in queens, and you're good at making stuff as well, I reckon there's a few quid to be made doing this. I'm absolutely shocking doing that. When I put it on Twitter, social media, people said, oh, use an STC controller that and a heating pad this. I was really worried about blowing up my car. I just wanted to buy a plug-and-play ready-made solution that I can use to transport these queen cells around. Big one here that was on 12-volt electric. Somebody pointed me in the direction of Apitak and said that they'd imported one from Romania and they thought it was pretty good. I looked on their website and I thought, this looks pretty much what I'm looking for. It looked a little bit basic. It's a plastic box with a foam insert and a heating pad, and it was kind of like £160. And then I got whacked on loads of VAT and customs charges, so overall it cost me a little bit over £200. But I think it's really good. So in this video, I'm going to show you around it, show you how simple it is, show you how it works, and then you'll see this lots and lots throughout the season because we're going to do a huge amount of videos on queen rearing. You're interested in queen rearing, you're interested in finding out how to rear queens to get them through from larva to feeding them to capped cells to virgins and mated queens, hit the subscribe button. We're going to do a lot of videos on this this year. Right, so let's take a look at the box then. As you can see, it's a cheap plastic construction. I really would have liked to see this to be a metal construction, but hey ho, it's not a metal construction. I knew that when I was going to buy it, but I do think when you're paying this kind of price, it would be nice to be metal. It's got a very handy little section up there though, which is really good to put a few consumables and accessories in that you can access without actually opening it up. Remember, the whole idea here is to keep the warmth in. You don't want to have to think, oh, I need a little bit of this, so I need to go in and get that and have to open it up and let all that heat out. So really glad to see that there's some sort of hinge storage on the top. Then included in it, you get your power cable. And again, it's a little bit rough, a little bit ready, but it works. But it looks like a relatively sturdy connector. The connector just fits into this socket here. And then what's nice is that it's got a screw connection on to make sure that it's fitted at all times. So that's what it looks like once it's connected in, nice and sturdy. And then on the other end, you've got your 12-volt connector. Now you might argue here, it would have been nice if they'd have given you a 12-volt and a 230-volt or 240-volt option. But for me, that's no issue at all. I've got a big 230-volt incubator that I'm going to use at home. I wanted this as a car incubator, something that I could plug into the truck to keep them warm while I'm traveling around for the day. So I'm happy with just 12 volts. So on the inside, you can see really nice and simple construction. But again, it is a little bit basic. It is a little bit budget. It's the kind of thing that if I'd have had a go at doing it, I'd have probably made it a better job maybe myself. Just a little bit rough and ready around the edges. And this is the problem, is that you can't buy these on the market. I know that Carousell is available. And I have no doubt in my mind that the Carousel would be made considerably better than this. But in reality, it's going to serve its purpose. It's a lot cheaper than the Carousel. This one here holds around 150 cells, and for that version of the Carousel, you were looking at a lot more money. The foam looks like a really nice quality foam though. It springs back into position. The cuts out of the foam are very neat indeed, so I'm happy with that. And then if you can just see down there, you've got a metal warming plate. All of the metal warming plate is hidden beneath that metal grid there, so you can't see it. Hopefully it's going to last me years and years, but I can't comment on that until I've run it for a good few seasons. So there we go, that's the first look at my Apitec queen incubator. I'm going to run all of my queen cells through that this season when I'm moving them between apiaries. You'll see a lot more of it. Can I recommend it? Only as much as that it actually turned up and that it switches on when I plug it into the 12-volt. Definitely a little bit rough around the edges though. You could definitely make something better and cheaper yourself. Or if you've got friends in high places, they might make you one and send you one as well. I'm not jealous of Chris Manton's queen incubator one bit. Not jealous in the slightest. Don't even want it. I've got my own one. But in all honesty, I'm just really happy I've got this in time for the season. I've got a new queen incubator coming that's going to be my home incubator, and that is a dedicated queen incubation unit from Germany that works with the Nikko cages, and that can hold about 200 cages in at a time. So I'll definitely update that one later on in the year and show you a review of that as well. If you want to see my top to bottom video on how to rear queens, check out this video here where we go through the whole process.