In this No Nonsense Beekeeping episode, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey reviews Andermatt UK's automatic syringe designed for trickling oxalic acid solutions (e.g., Oxivar) to control Varroa mites. He explains why beekeepers need an automatic syringe, walks through the product’s design—including a compatible container, pre‑assembled hose, plunger‑style dispensing unit, and thumb‑wheel calibration from 1 ml to 5 ml. Laurence demonstrates the syringe using a Ribena solution to show consistent 5 ml dosing per lever press, discusses how the calibration accounts for air bubbles, and highlights the benefits of precise dosing: reduced risk of overdosing bees, medical‑grade build quality, and ease of use. He discloses that the unit was provided free by Andermatt UK, provides purchase links, and recommends the syringe for beekeepers who prefer trickling over sublimation. The video ends with a promise of a follow‑up tutorial on applying Oxivar to bees.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to review the automatic syringe from Andermatt UK. So Andermatt very kindly sent me this syringe free of charge, but I'm still going to give you my honest review and recommendations for this product. You can buy this direct on Andermatt's site, which is www.andermattuk.com. I'll stick a link up in the comments. And I'll put a link at the bottom of this video as well. Before we go any further, please check out honeybeeBay.co.uk, an online beekeeping marketplace connecting buyers and sellers. Right, on to the review of the automatic syringe from Biomatt UK. So why do you need an automatic syringe in beekeeping? Now, the reason that we use syringes mainly is for trickling oxalic acid solution, whether that's an Oxivar that comes from Andematt or an ApiBioxal or any of the other products that are on the market that you can use for trickling. What you would normally use is one of the bog-standard plastic syringes, and in my experience, they are, they're a little bit clumsy and they're quite difficult to control. So this product here seeks to eliminate any of the error when you're using the manual syringes. So automatic syringes, we've discussed why we need them, and I have to say, I really do like the design of this product. It's quite an expensive product, so it's around £90, £100 including delivery and VAT, but it's really well designed. You can tell this is a medical-grade product. I'm not sure what other uses they have for it. All I know is that it's really good for trickling Oxivar or any other oxalic acid solution onto your bees. So purpose of this video, I'm just going to show you some of the features of this automatic syringe, show you how it works, and tell you why I think it's a really good product. Right, so first off, you get a container at the bottom there And no surprise, it is the exact same container where the Oxivar comes in. So if you're using Andermatt's trickling solution, which is Oxivar, also can be used as a spray solution, it fits directly onto this container. So that's really nice, nice design touch. You can see why they've done it, to try and get you to buy their products. We're going to review this product in a separate video, but I do think it's a good product and it works well with the automatic syringe. So when you take this off, you get quite a strange design inside. And I thought to myself, this is, this is a bit strange. It's not normally what I'm used to, but it's a nice design. And what it means is that it's going to get all of the liquid until the very last drop. So you can tilt it all into the corner and then you're going to be able to dispense all of the liquid in here without trying to tilt it with a, with a solid hose that you would get in normal products. So really nice design. They've definitely thought about that, and they've tried to make it as user-friendly as they possibly can. So then connecting out of the bottle, this all comes pre-assembled. You get a hose that goes all the way to the automatic dispensing unit. Now the dispensing unit, all it is is like a plunger, looks a little bit like a football pump. It connects into the hose that's going to transfer whatever oxalic acid solution you've got in there. You've got a dispensing nozzle here, and then you've got a calibration chamber in there. So you can calibrate how much you want to dispense on each push of this lever. So as you can see on this video here, the calibration is really, really easy. It's just done on a thumb wheel and it goes from 1 milliliter to 5 milliliters. And when we're using oxalic acid, any of the products that are on the market, we go for 5 milliliters per seam. So I've calibrated this one to give me 5 milliliters for each push of this lever here. Now, to show you this product working effectively, I'm gonna do it with Ribena. So all you need to do is put some solution in there. Obviously, this will be oxalic acid solution, not Ribena. And then just screw the lid on. I find it easier to screw the base as opposed to screwing the top. That way you're not putting any torsion stress within the pipe, just trying to kind of keep that longevity. And that's it. It's set up and it's ready to dispense. You've got the calibration set, so we set that to 5 milliliters. And then all we do is we're just pressing that down. That's creating suction within the pipe, and you can see it's coming through like that now. So if you do a full dispense like that and then a nice slow retrieve, that completely fills the chamber, and then there's no air in it, and you can put it out again. Nice retrieve, and you're just getting that minimum amount of air. So what I like to do with this is I like to just dispense it all out, And I take it just a little bit back past the 5 ml, and then that accounts for the air bubble that you get each time, and it's a consistent amount. So you're probably having about 5.5 ml in the chamber. That accounts for the air bubble, means you're going to get a really accurate dispense each and every time. And that's pretty much about it. This is a really nice, simple product. It takes the stress out of mixing up oxalic acid and then repeatedly trying to fill up your syringe. And then overdosing your bees on a seam-by-seam basis. This guarantees that each press that you have on that lever here is going to dispense exactly 5 milliliters of solution. Make sure you're getting the correct concentrations per solution, and then you've got absolutely no chance of overdosing your bees. It's quite difficult to overdose your bees on oxalic acid, but you don't want to be giving them too much, and there is a risk that it can do damage to the bees if you give them too much solution. So I really, really do like this product. Like I say, it's available from www.andermattuk.com. They're also on Amazon, they're also on eBay. If you just Google Andermatt automatic syringe, you'll see the product come up. But without a doubt, I would recommend this product if you're going down the route of, um, trickling and you don't want to get into sublimation. And that is the argument for a completely different video. I think this is an excellent tool. It's good, it works well, it's well designed, and it's a good, safe, and effective way to add oxalic acid to your bees to help eliminate varroa mites. So finally, thanks to Andermatt UK for sending this product in. I appreciate you sending me the products to review. As I've said before, this is an honest review recommendation. I've not been paid anything to say any of this, although the product has been provided for me. For free. So we're going to do a separate video showing how to apply the Oxivar to your bees. Going to do that video straight after this one, but we're going to cover it in a separate video. I'm going to use the automatic dispenser syringe and actually show you how to apply it to bees, and I'll show you how you can get that really good control over your bees to make sure that you're getting the correct dosing per seam. So as always, thanks for watching the video. I hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
