BBWear Suit - Product Review

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to be taking a look at bee suits. So the idea of this video is I'm just going to give you a bit of a background as to the suits that I've kind of worn over the last 5 to 6 years. I'm going to show you the suits that I currently wear. I'm going to tell you why I went ahead and purchased those suits. I'm going to give you a flavour of the kind of different situations where I might wear those suits, give you a recommendation as to what you should go ahead and buy, and just generally take a look at kind of the features of some of the suits that I own. So over the 5 or 6 years that I've been beekeeping, I've probably been through maybe 5 or 6 suits. In the early years, I tended to buy more suits because the ones that I bought kept on breaking. So these are kind of suits that obviously originate, come from China. They may be £20 or £30 each, and when you get them, they actually look like reasonable quality, but there's some kind of real defects within these suits that make them not suitable for longer-term use. The main one for me is the quality of the zips. The zips tend to break very easily. The hem and the seams aren't as strong, so if you snag them on anything, they can pull away. The idea of a bee suit is to give you protection from bees entering and stinging you, and if the zips don't work properly or the seams come away, then it's really not much use as a bee suit. The other thing that's really kind of pronounced in the cheaper bee suits is the quality of the mesh. Now I find when you're using these poor quality suits, they work and you don't get stung by the bees, but you have a bit of a hard time viewing through the mesh, especially in kind of poor conditions. So if it's sunny like it is today and the light comes through the mesh at the wrong angle, it can actually be quite difficult to see. So what I've done is I've actually invested in 3 different suits now, and I use those suits for 3 relatively different occasions. 2 of them are quite similar, but it's more that I purchased the cheaper one and then moved on to the more expensive one, and I'll explain a little bit, like, a little bit about that later. So the 3 suits that I own at the moment are all from BB Wear. I own a schmock, which is a half suit that comes down to there and you pull it in tight. So I'll use that for if I'm just doing a very, very quick inspection of a colony. Maybe I just want to kind of go to a single nuc that I know has been mating and I just want to quickly check for eggs. We're talking a 10-15 second inspection. There's no need to kind of put the full suit on. And then I own 2 full body suits as well. And the reason I've got the 2 full body suits is that I probably purchased the first one a little bit in error. So BB Wear has 2 different types of their normal suit. So we won't talk about ventilated suits. We'll leave that for another review. They have 2 types of their normal suits, so they have a basic one and then they have kind of like an all-singing, all-dancing version. And I wish I'd gone for the all-singing, all-dancing version first because it has a number of features that I find very, very useful. So purpose of this video is I'm just going to quickly put these 3 suits on, talk you through some of the features, and give you a bit of a feel as to why I think those features are good and why I think the suits are good. Okay, so the first one that I've got is the smock. As you can see, it kind of only comes down halfway here. It's got elasticated cuffs there, and the cuffs also have a thumb pull on them. So as you can see there, you have a thumb pull. You put your thumb in, and then that keeps that up. So when you put the gloves on, it keeps that nice and tight, and you have the overlap between your glove and the suit. Very, very good for keeping the bees out. All of this is elasticated, and then you can tighten that up as well, so you can pull it in nice and tight, and that helps to stop the bees getting in. It's definitely not foolproof though. If the bees are kind of intent in getting up underneath there, they will, and if you use a suit like this on an aggressive colony, you're almost certainly kind of going to get stung around the torso, which isn't very nice. So like I say, I'd use this just for very, very quick inspections. Maybe during up to 2 or 3 minutes that I'm going to be in the suit, I'll use this. I keep this in the car with me at all times along with my swarm collection kit. So if I need to put it on quickly, so I need to kind of go and catch a swarm, I'll chuck this on and it does really well. The material is a very, very good quality material. Like, it's thick and the seams and the hems are really, really solid. Now, that's a positive in terms of the protection from the bee stings. The bees will still actually sting through that unless you have another layer on underneath, but it's just good quality, so it stops. You don't really get any rips or any tears, or too many tears. But actually, it's also a bit of a negative. Now, I said I'm not going to talk too much about ventilated suits in this review. I'll keep that for another video. But the problem with this heavy fabric is that you do sweat a lot, and especially if you're doing a lot of inspections in the full body suits, you can get I'm very, very sweaty. So the hood is the fencing-style hood. I always wear the fencing-style hood. I much prefer them. I'd often wear a cap with it as well to keep the veil away from my face. The quality of the mesh though is very good. I've had a number of suits where the mesh quality is very, very poor indeed, so the BB Wear suit is very, very good. The zips, again, nice and solid. And the Velcro is nice and solid. So there's not a huge amount more to say about that. One of the features that I do like on this suit though, and it's a feature that my other suit doesn't have, is the fact that these are, um, there's Velcro on the pockets. Now it doesn't go all the way across, it's only a tab, so if they were going to do it again, I'd like to see it all the way across. But please, if you're going to buy a suit and it's going to have pockets in, get the version with the Velcro on, or even better than that, if they do a zip version, go great because I like to keep a lot of stuff in my bee suit. So I'll kind of, in the season, I'll have marker pens and queen catchers and various different bits and bobs that I'll keep in there to save me going back to my box, save me going back to the truck. And if you put these things in here and then you lean down, they drop out. And that's happened a number of times. It's actually happened to me previously where I've put either mated queens or virgins in there in cages, and in my other suit that is, and I've leant down and I've lost them. So that's a really, really neat feature. Obviously it's a very simple feature, but some of the suits don't have that, so that's certainly something to look out for. And that's about it. So we'll quickly go and put one of the other suits on and I'll show you around the features of that. Okay, so this is the first expensive suit that I bought. It was from BB Wear, it was their basic suit, cost me about £110, something like that. And very soon after buying this suit bought another suit from them. I was overall happy with the quality, but what I wasn't happy with is a few of the real key features that I didn't like about this suit that was taken care of in the other suit that they sell. So I'll just run through it. First one, no pockets on the arms. Didn't like that. I think it's a lot of wasted space on there. You see some of them, they have like a hive tool pocket. I think that's a really, really neat solution, and that's not actually on the other one, but something that I'd like to add to this one. I've only got one pocket on the left-hand side and no pockets on the front here apart from some hand pockets. No pockets on my legs here. But the important one is there's no Velcro, like I said, on this pocket here. So whenever I used to lean down on this one, stuff used to drop out. Used to drive me insane. You can see the hem has actually come away on this one here. So that's going in and going to get repaired very, very shortly. That was my fault though, that's not really much to do with the suit, that's just kind of come away when I caught it on something, so can't really blame the suit for that one. We've got elasticated cuffs, but you don't have the thumb pull, so when you're pulling gloves on it sometimes rides up a little bit like that, so it's nice to have the thumb pull on there. It didn't have zips on the legs, so in order to put the suit on, you had to take your shoes off, you had to take your wellies off, and that was a real pain. I didn't think that was going to be a big issue for me, but it actually is. It's a lot easier just to kind of whip it on over your shoes and over your wellies and do the zips back down again, as opposed to having to kind of sit down and take your shoes off. So all of these features I very, very quickly became annoyed and frustrated with, and I thought, I'm going to upgrade and go for a different suit. The veil is very similar on all 3 of them. They're actually completely interchangeable, the 3 veils. So perfectly acceptable. I'll wear a cap, it keeps it away from my face like that, stops bees getting in and stinging me. The visibility is very good. It's not perfect, but it's absolutely kind of acceptable for beekeeping activities. So I'll pop on my final suit now and I'll show you what I really like about that final suit and all of the added functionality that you get with it. And finally, I'm in the suit that I use most often. As you can see, it's a bit dirty. It needs a good wash, but a lot of this is actually kind of stains that I can't get out through washing it anyway. And the reason it's so dirty and kind of so battered is that I use it probably for 95% of my beekeeping activities. Now I'll run through all the features of this one again. There's one real key feature in here that I do want to drill down into that's A bit of a blessing for larger beekeepers. So from the top down, we've got the cuffs again. So we've got elasticated cuffs and we've got the thumb pulls on it. So obviously that helps with putting your gloves on. So you've got 2 pockets. They've both got Velcro all the way across. Nice deep pockets. I tend to keep like a few queen cages in there, maybe my marking pens, a queen catcher. They're kind of pretty full. And I'll keep them full throughout the season for things that I need whilst I'm out doing my beekeeping. And they're, I mean, they're nice and secure with the Velcro. Nothing's going to fall out. I've got an additional 2 pockets here, and they're very nice and deep pockets as well. Again, I'll just kind of keep stuff in them. I'll probably keep my phone in them, or I mean other stuff that I need, my keys, anything that I'm doing while I'm out doing A lot of inspecting, maybe keep a bottle of water or something in there as well. Like, I do tend to kind of weigh myself down a little bit, but it's, it's a lot easier for me carrying that around while I'm doing the inspections than it is kind of going and going back to the truck every 10 minutes to go and get something. I've got another 2 pockets here. Don't really tend to use them that much. There's no, there's no kind of Velcro or no way of closing them up, so I'm reluctant to kind of put anything in there because I could lose it. No pockets on the arms or anything. That's probably something that I'd like to see going forward. It's a— I mean, just a pocket there would be a really neat place to keep some pens, maybe a small hive tool, just something dedicated to go on there. Again, the veil, just the same as the rest of them, absolutely fine. You've got your fencing veil. I'd keep the cap on. The visibility is good, no tears or anything. Like, the seams and the hems are really, really good quality there, so you can tell they've put a lot of effort into making that a really secure veil. Another big one might be difficult to see on here though is the zips on the legs, so I can put this on whilst leaving my wellies on. I mean, I can just undo that and take that off whilst leaving my wellies on. That's a really nice feature. That's one of the big reasons that I kind of upgraded to this. And then this final feature that probably not a lot of people know about unless you go and speak directly with BB Wear. But this is actually a custom suit, so you can't buy this without going to them and getting them to measure you. Now I found, I went down to Seawind Jones and I tried on a lot of the different suits there, and the extra large was fine in terms of the torso, in terms of the kind of my rotundness, it had just enough kind of bagginess to it. But it wasn't long enough, so it was right up kind of in my crotch like that, and it was very uncomfortable for beekeeping. And when I did any bending, I really was worried that I was going to split it. So I thought, okay, well, I'll go up to the XL then, so 2XL. And I put that on and I had exactly the same problem. There was no additional length in the suit, they just made it wider for kind of like a larger person in that dimension. So I very, very nearly didn't buy the suit from BB Wear at all. I thought, well, the XL's not long enough for me and the XXL is not long enough for me and just kind of significantly wider, which I didn't like. And then they told me that you can actually order a custom-made one. So what they did is they took my measurements, my height and my width and my waist, and they sent it off to BB Wear. And what they did is they added an additional 3 inches into the torso for me and kind of in terms of my height. I did it as a custom order. Now, I thought this was going to cost loads of money. It only cost an extra £20. So that's a really, really useful tip for anyone out there. If you're struggling with the sizing of wetsuits, speak to BB Wear. Maybe go and try the XXL on, or try the medium on, or whatever. And if you're an unusual size, they can add or cut a special wetsuit for you, and it's only an extra £20. Now trust me, that extra £20 such a good use of money because you wear your bee suit a lot throughout the season and you really, really do need to be comfortable in it. So yeah, my advice, if you can't find a suit that's fitting you well, speak to BB Wear. They'll measure you up, or you can send them the measurements, and then they'll kind of do a bespoke suit for you for an extra £20. So that's it, we've come to the end of the review today. To summarize, I've got 3 beekeeping suits from BB Wear. I've got this, the smock, which is just the half suit. I've got their basic full suit, which I didn't like all of the functionality of, but I like the quality of. And then I've got their kind of fully advanced, all singing, all dancing version. What I don't have from them, I don't have their ventilated suit. I've not tried any ventilated suits yet, so I'm definitely going to give those a go this season. A few people have put me off in terms of The fact that they snag on undergrowth and that they're easy to tear. But I think I'm going to get hold of a couple of them and maybe do like a side-by-side review, because when I get to the end of, uh, I mean, a 4 or 5 hour inspection run, I'm literally dripping with sweat. It's not a good sight. So anything I can do to kind of reduce, um, the heat that I'm experiencing during those inspections can only be a good thing. So I'll definitely give them a go. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. Just again, another basic one. If you're looking for a bee suit, Take a look at the options. BB Wear, very, very good supplier. They can take care of you. Other suppliers to look at, BJ Sheriff. They're obviously kind of up there with BB Wear as the top 2 in the UK for quality bee suits. You'll be able to get these suits from a number of different sellers. So, I mean, Simon the Beekeeper offers suits and various other manufacturers like that. I would just say beware of the cheaper ones because you do get what you pay for. And I mean, if you're gonna— if you're serious about beekeeping, it's best to kind of invest in a good quality suit from the off. It's a false economy. Like I said, I probably went through 2 or 3 poor quality suits by the time I settled on a more expensive one. So I probably spent more on the cheap ones that are kind of sitting at home now as spares than I did on the more expensive ones that are still going strong and that are easily repairable as well. Bebeware and BJ Sheriff do full repairs on these suits, so if you send them back to them, they'll kind of do any repair you want. One of the other real good things about a kind of top-quality manufacturer like that is that they offer spares. So if a zip breaks or if you burn your veil or something, they can supply you with these additional accessories, obviously at a cost, but it means instead of having to purchase a completely new suit, you can just kind of get the spares and make do with that one. So I hope you've enjoyed the video today. Please hit the subscribe button and hit the bell and you'll get a notification for each video that we upload. I hope you're all looking forward to the upcoming beekeeping season. It's a very lovely day today in North Wales, sitting around 11-12 degrees. Not a huge amount of actions from the bees just as yet, but we're getting very, very close. So give it kind of 6-7 weeks and we'll be, we'll be well and truly on our way. So thanks again and I'll see you soon.