Buying Second Hand Equipment - Is it worth it?

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to talk to you and try and persuade you not to buy secondhand beekeeping equipment. So before I go any further, this isn't to say everybody who sells secondhand beekeeping equipment is trying to pull a fast one Or trying to get one over on you. Rather, I'm trying to say I think the value is in buying new seconds equipment or looking for the sales for really good bargains. If you compare the two, so a really good bargain in the sales or some seconds equipment, um, that you can get for a really, really good price versus secondhand equipment, I would say 9 times out of 10, the value is in the, the first one of those. Which is buying the equipment new. And that's not me trying to promote any particular retailer, that is my honest opinion just in terms of what I think is best value for you. So what has driven this video? I've got loads of secondhand boxes here, so I've not bought this from someone. I had a call from a gentleman who I sold a nuc to a couple of years ago now who said he was moving house at the end of this week. So he's called me up and said, I urgently need to get rid of all of my colonies. And he got a couple of colonies there, or so he thought, and he got some leftover boxes and stuff as well. He asked me was I interested, and I kind of politely declined and said, but probably not, to be honest, because there's not a huge amount of value in them, and I'm not sure how the colonies are looking, whether they've been treated, and all of this nonsense. So I went down there and had a look, and in the end I decided that I would take them away just to, just to do him a favor, because no one else was going to go and take these colonies away. So I'm covering that in a separate video. You can have a look, and they're again abandoned hives, neglected hives. Really interesting taking a look in them, but they're not in the best state at all. But he's got loads of this equipment and he just said, look, do you want this equipment? It's just going to go to the tip otherwise. So I said, yeah, sure, I'll take it on. If it comes to it, I can take it to the tip. So I know this is not going to be fully indicative of what you're going to find on the marketplace, but You might find stuff like this. I've bought secondhand equipment off people before and it's been a bit rubbish. So I just want to run you through some of the equipment that I bought, show you some of the issues with it, and try and convince you why I think secondhand equipment's not the way to go and that you should be buying new equipment for as cheap as you can possibly get it. Right, so first thing I found is a roof, and that's clearly been made out of reclaimed wood. And to be honest, someone's done quite a nice job of that. They folded the aluminium quite well. But oh my God, it is so heavy. So out of all of the things, this is probably the best. I would definitely use that. I'll give it a scorch on the inside, which I'm doing on a separate video. But then yeah, that can be used again. That's not too bad. It's solid, although it's made out of the wrong material, means it's a little bit heavy. Now you wouldn't believe your luck. I've got a Swienti 14 by 12 brood box. So do you know what I mean? Chances of me getting that are so slim. That's in really good condition. That just needs a good clean. Put some bleach or some soda crystals into a bath, give that a wash, and that one is good to go. Then we get on to some of the more interesting items in my little lot. So it's the first one. It is, it's a Cedar Super, so it's the right material, but it's just been absolutely bodged together. Like no, no, no glue, no screws on any of the dovetails, which is, is an easy remedy because I can just kind of take that apart and glue and screw it. Do you mean they've put a couple of screws in here? But yeah, that's really badly put together. But the worst thing about this, and I'll tell you what, I, I've done this on boxes before. I think National boxes are quite difficult to put together and getting them right. Pulled out of frame. You can see the issues with that. But as you can see, they've built the box completely wrong. So they've not put, uh, the, the runners on correctly, which means that you've effectively got a super with a top B space. So that's not compatible with any of my equipment. And unless you know what you're looking for there, you might not immediately pick that up. Do you know what I mean? It's easy to see that that corner is not screwed up together, But you've got a real issue there, so you're going to have to look at putting some sort of kind of runner in there or bodging that, putting a castellation in there. You're going to have to do something to make that work with the rest of your kit. Again, it's something that you might not immediately kind of like realize when you're buying this equipment, something to look out for though. And then this one here, again, it's a Cedar brood box. They put the runners in about right on this one, it's not actually that bad. Um, it's obviously not been put together very well, but I mean, I could repair that and I could use that, so there's not too much wrong with that one. Relatively happy. Now, now we get to some of the really fun ones. Um, so when I spoke to the guy, these are the ones he said were the solid ones, and they're just falling apart. Like, they're made of ply, I think. They're definitely not cedar. Yeah, I can see kind of laminations across the front there. You can see that it's bowed. You can see that the joints— it's a finger, a finger joint as opposed to a dovetail joint. It's been made with these kind of handhelds here. It is made for National, so it's National sizing, but that's very clearly someone's just kind of whipped that up and put that together. I see loads of stuff like this on the market, and I just think, I mean, even if you're getting that— so I'm just looking at all rot in the corner— even if you're getting that for, say, a fiver, I mean, which is maybe like 65-70% off what you'd pay for a new second cedar box. It's just not worth doing the work to that to make it into a new box. Um, that would take me absolutely ages to get that together into a box, probably half an hour of my time to make that suitable. I just haven't got the time to be doing that. So I mean, that for me, that's going on the scrap heap. I'll use that, I'll stick that in the log burner this year because that is Too much work for me to mess around with. And then the same with this box here, they've not even bothered to kind of lap any of the joints here, so we don't have finger joints on here, we don't have dovetails, we just have a butt joint into some ply with some nails into it. Really, really interesting that these are very old boxes. But they're just an absolute mess. They really are a mess. So yeah, so I'm not going to do anything with these and I'm going to stick them on the fire. There's a few bits in there I can use. I mean, I've not paid anything for any of this. I've done the guy a favor taking his colonies away and I gave him some honey in return because he was a really nice guy. But yeah, it's— there are so many issues with these boxes. You can see here as well, just picking up on this one, they've actually tried to add Another rim because they've probably realized that they've got them on the wrong bee space, so they're adding rims on the bottom. Not worth my time. So there you go, that's my warning. I would always go down the route of trying to pick up some bargains in the sales, going for new wooden equipment, but always going for the seconds because they're absolutely fine. They're just used with a supposedly inferior grade of wood. Seconds cedar hives are amazing. I really, really would go for them. So hopefully you've seen enough there. I mean, this is a batch that I've bought. Obviously, it's not completely indicative of what you're going to get on the market. You will find some good stuff on the market. You will find some rubbish stuff on the market. It's just kind of saying before you go into it and turn up with a big wadful of cash to buy some secondhand beekeeping equipment, try and ask some questions about how it was put together, how old it is, the material that it's made of, if it's the correct format for your hive, if the bee spaces are correct. There's a lot of stuff that you can kind of identify with questions that should hopefully mean that you don't turn up and get colonies and boxes that are pulling apart like that. You really can do a lot better than that. So that's all this video is, quick one. I hope you've enjoyed it. 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.