Bee Equipment Poly Nuc Review

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video today, I'm going to review the Bee Equipment 2-in-1 Poly Nuc. So you may notice I'm in a, I'm in a different apiary today. I'm down here just trying to get on top of all the overwintered nucs that we're sending out, so I'm doing the video in a different place, so excuse the direct sunshine. In this video though, we're going to go through all of the features of the Bee Equipment 2-in-1 Poly Nuc. So we're going to talk about the roof, we're going to talk about the box, we're going to talk about the poly density, the entrance, the dividers, the floor, and all of the other stuff that we normally cover in our product reviews. So first thing to say with this product is I ordered this on Black Friday 2020, and it is now the middle of April 2021. So it's taken them half a year to get it from me placing the order to actually getting it to my door. And when I placed the order, there was nothing on the website that said it was delayed. After about a week of me placing the order, I had something come through that said, oh, it's been delayed now. Your, your items have been clumped up into a different order, so it's now delayed. It's going to be January, and then February, and then March. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it's arrived. So it's come over on the slow boat from China, and it's taken me 6 months to go from placing the order through to getting that to my door. Happened with a few products that I've got from Bee Equipment. Kind of leaves a little bit of a sour taste in your mouth when you're ordering something on Black Friday. You're thinking, as long as it gets here by Christmas, that's probably okay. Middle of April is maybe pushing it a little bit. So it comes as a flat pack poly nuc, and as far as I'm aware, it's the only flat pack poly nuc that's available. All of the other poly nucs tend to come as either a one piece or as a compatible mix and match. So you have a floor, a brood box, and a roof. I've not had one that comes in sections like this, so instead of me going through it on the video and just showing you how all the sections go together, I just thought I'd show you in a few pictures. Comes flat-packed like that, and you just slot everything together. It's a nice tight fit, really, really simple design, but it leads me on to a really big disappointment with this polystyrene. It is the most lightweight polystyrene I've ever come across in all of my beekeeping, and it's very different from the Park Beekeeping Nuc because the Park Beekeeping Nuc is very lightweight but with very thick walls. Walls, and they do that to give you the maximum insulation properties possible, whereas the Bee Equipment poly nuc is lightweight, made with really lightweight product packaging grade poly with incredibly thin walls. So my mind is, where's the benefit? I'd buy a poly nuc to give me really good overwintering thermal performance, and I don't reckon that this is going to be that much better than a wooden hive. Nonetheless, we'll go through all of the features in this video Just wanted to get those 2 big gripes out of the way. Considerable delivery time and very, very low density polystyrene, which is not a good thing. So even when you lift this up, it's so lightweight, like it's literally featherweight. Be really interesting to see what the density of this poly actually is because it feels quite solid to the touch, which leads me to believe that it's probably in the region of like 80 grams to 100 grams per liter, which is standard density for polystyrene. It's just that it's really, really thin. And that's why it's so lightweight. So it'd be interesting to see how it holds up, and it'd be interesting to see what B Equipment say in terms of the actual density of the polystyrene. Right, starting at the top then, the roof. Um, the roof's a really, really tight fit. I couldn't believe how awkward it was to get the roof on and off. Um, it's a rebated edge, so similar to all of the poly designs, you have a rebated edge so it sits on, so it shouldn't blow off because it's a very tight fit. But when you try and put it on, like, you get this effect where it just— you can't quite get it on, and you have to like pressure it in to get it on, which is Okay, you get a good fit, but as soon as the bees start gluing all this down, propolis, building that out, that's going to be really, really difficult to get that roof on. You've got a little bit of space in the roof, which is something I always look for. You've got about 30mm there, so you can, you can put a big slab of fondant on top of the frames. And that's a really important consideration with this nuc because it doesn't come with a feeder. I think I paid around £30 for this nuc. It wasn't, it wasn't one of the most expensive ones, but it definitely wasn't one of the cheapest ones. And I would expect some sort of feeder to come with it. It's annoying when they don't come with a feeder because it means I've got to go out and buy a feeder or put a frame feeder in it, and it just adds to the cost. So when you're comparing it to, say, the BS 2-in-1 Polynuc or the Abello Polynuc, both of those do come with, with feeders of sorts. This one doesn't come with a feeder unless you pay extra for it, so a bit of a frustration there. You've got hive strap rebates on the side here. Not really fussed about any hive strap rebates. Nice flat surface with a little bit of texture on it. Not going to get any gunk or any branding on the roof, which is nice. Something I really don't like is branding on a flat surface like that. Difficult to paint, just gets loads of grime in it as well. So nice to see a pretty basic design. So then we move on to the divider, and it's a Correx divider, and it just doesn't fit very well. You can see I've really not been rough with this divider at all, and just look, it's broken already. So the Correx divider is no good. Straight off the bat, that is absolutely useless. You can see it on that side, it's not quite happened yet, but it's the same problem that the BS Honeybees nuc had, is that the Correx just isn't strong enough. It's strong enough over here, so if you bend it, you've— even there, I was going to say if you bend it, it's all right. It's not even strong enough on a big wide piece like that. This bit over here straight away goes, and then when you try and put that down into the divider, Just bends, just goes all over the place. It's a mess. I can't stand Correx dividers. They're the most annoying thing to happen to poly nucs. And now that I've played with the aluminium Dibond divider that the BS Honeybees have got, there is no place in my beekeeping for any Correx dividers anymore. So we'll put that Correx divider down there. That won't be coming out again. I'm just going to treat this as a 6-frame nuc going forward, and that's not the end of the world. I do that with a lot of my BS Honeybees 2-in-1, so 2x3-frame nucs. Run them as 6-framers and they're really good at 6 frames and you just get an additional entrance at the back which I use for vaping or you can use it on hot days to add additional ventilation as well. So just because the 2-in-1 function doesn't work, I'm not immediately writing this off. So the next little trick that this 2-in-1 nuc has is that it's a 2-in-1 nuc in that you've got 2 entrances so you can have 2 3-frame splits if you can get the divider to work or make your own divider, but it also works as a Langstroth version And a national version, and that's what these little bits that come out here are for. So if you take both of them out, you can run it as a Langstroth, 6-frame Langstroth, and then if you put these runners in, you run it as a 6-frame national. And as I've always said with these combination hives, it's a manufacturer's trick. There's no real benefit to me because I don't use Langstroth. It means that they can sell these nucs to people who use Langstroth, and they can sell the nucs to people who use nationals, and I understand why they do it. And if there's no detriment to either the Langstroth user or the National user, I've got no problem with it. And I don't think in this instance there is any disadvantage to it being 2-in-1, but I don't like it being sold to me as a benefit saying, oh, it's 2-in-1, you can use Langstroth or National, because I'm only really going to use one of those. So that's what these are for. These just slide in, really simple, nice fit as well. When you lift them out though, it's, it's just crazy like how thin everything is. I really want to know what the density of this polystyrene is. Definitely lower than 100 grams per liter. Like, it's featherweight. Like, I could easily break that with my hands just bending it. I don't think I could do that with a lot of the 100 grams per liter density polystyrene. And when you look at it, it does just look like product packaging polystyrene, clearly been made to a budget. It's not up there with other poly nucs that are on the market. And then as we work our way around the nuc, things are very, very basic. So you've got handles on All 4 sides, which is nice on a poly nuc. You don't often have that. Very, very thin on this side though, so you wouldn't want to pick it up there. You probably want to pick it up that way around, and it's still pretty thin to pick up. A lot of poly nucs though don't really have handles, rely on you kind of holding it from the bottom like that, so it's not the end of the world. The one thing I would say with this though is the wall thickness is by far and away the thinnest wall thickness I have seen on any beehive ever. Polywood, anyone? It's about 10 millimeters thick in the thinnest place, and they've taken out the maximum amount of polystyrene to get the cost of the polystyrene down as low as they can possibly go. And I just think, what's the point? What is the point in having a polystyrene nuke that's made out of like a product packaging grade polystyrene with 10 millimeter walls? It's not going to be durable. It's just going to break. You're not getting the thermal insulation. Really, really disappointed with this nuke so far. The next thing to say is the quality control. It's terrible. I can't believe how bad the quality control is here. You've got an entrance disc that sits on the front here like that, and it's been molded into the poly, so there's like a circular mold for the entrance disc to sit. But the entrance disc doesn't fit inside it. It's about 3 millimeters too big, so it doesn't fit. So you just got to screw it in at an angle just to try and bodge it. Like, it's simple things like that. If I, if I owned a business, um, and that came over from China or came over from wherever, I'd reject the whole batch, or I'd say, well, send me some entrance reducers that fit, because it doesn't fit. Um, they clearly haven't checked all of this to see that there's an issue with this, and they just sent it out because it's 6 months late. I'm not going to bother sending this back. Um, I only bought this nuc to do a review on it. I didn't have particular high hopes for it. And I'm just sharing with all of you my findings. So quality control, really, really poor. The floor, pretty standard floor. You've got your Varoma mesh, 2 sides split in the middle so it can run as a 2x3 frame option. Comes with a very neatly cut piece of Correx, just slots in like that. That's actually a really neat solution. A lot of other nuc manufacturers don't have that little slot on the outside. It's quite difficult to block up the nuc if you want to block it up for any reason, or you want to block it up over winter. So that is actually a really nice design feature, something that other nuc manufacturers could take on board, put into their own nucs. So on the bottom of the nuc, you've got 8 feet, nice and stable, no problems when it's standing up nice and stable. I strap down all my poly nucs anyway just because they are at risk of toppling, especially light ones like this. I'd give it a good strap. I do fear though that when you strap this down, it's going to crush the poly, so you need to be aware of that. So then the final thing to say is the runners. Without those plastic things, I just can't get to work. You've got bare plastic runners. The bees are going to propolize those down. But I don't want to judge them too hard because I'm sure those plastic runners do fit in some way. I've just not worked out how to use them yet. So I think they have given you some protection on the plastic here. So it shouldn't be too bad to actually get the frames to sit on those runners. It's a top beespace nuc, which is nice. I do like the top beespace nuc. Gives you a little bit more kind of freedom to work. Means that you're not going to crush too many bees when you put the roof on. It doesn't come with a crown board though. So whereas the, the Paynes poly nuc comes with a nice crown board, this one here doesn't come with a feeder, doesn't come with a crown board. So you're going to just end up taking the roof off and you're straight into the bees. So it's a cut-price nuc, definitely towards the lower end of the scale, but I just think they've cut, they've cut corners and they've cut quality and they've cut poly density and they've cut the amount of material. They've They've cut everything they possibly can to get the price to a point where it's cheaper than the competition. And in my mind, it's no way near any of the other competition on the market. I really don't like doing these reviews when you come to like a manufacturer or a product and you're just not keen on it, but I'm not going to recommend this product to you because I don't think it's a good product. It was very, very delayed, and I could probably live with a delay if it came and it was a fantastic product, and I'd say, okay, they've had issues with Brexit, they've had issues with COVID It's just late, but it's a good product. So hopefully they'll iron out those issues. It's come six months late. I think it's a really inferior product. It's got bad design. It's got quality control issues, and unfortunately, I just can't recommend this one. So there you go. That's my review of the Bee Equipment Two-in-One Poly Nuke. Takes Langstroth frames, national frames. You can have it set up as a two times three frame system or a six frame system. I'd only really recommend using it for the latter. We've discussed all of the features. We talked about the roof, the floor, the divider, the Correx board, the entrance, the runners, the density of the polystyrene, and the thickness of the walls. And my overall summary is I wouldn't recommend this product. I'd recommend for going one of the better options on the market. So I hope you found that review useful. Hope you enjoyed the video. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time. Bye.