In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates a practical, low‑cost method for cleaning poly beehives and nucs using soda crystals (washing soda) dissolved in water inside a repurposed 200‑litre oil drum. He explains why traditional wood‑hive cleaning methods (propane burners) are unsuitable for poly, outlines the challenges of keeping buoyant poly parts submerged, and shows how the drum’s lid and large volume solve this. Edwards details the preparation (2 kg soda crystals per 200 L water, stirring to dissolve), the step‑by‑step disassembly and placement of hive components (removing plugs and plastic bits that float), submerging the hive, sealing the drum, and allowing it to soak for up to 24 hours. He then walks through the post‑soak cleaning: brushing, scraping off softened wax and debris, rinsing with a gentle hose (avoiding pressure hoses that can damage poly), and final inspection. He notes that the soda solution can be reused for multiple loads and lasts several days. Edwards also mentions the drum’s secondary use for making up to 200 L of sugar syrup with a paddle mixer, highlighting its multifunctionality and cost‑saving benefits. The video’s purpose is to provide a quick, repeatable workflow that saves time and effort when cleaning poly equipment.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No-Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how I clean my poly hives using soda crystals. Now, all hives, whether they're wood or poly, at some point need cleaning. With wooden hives, you can scorch them with a propane burner. Obviously, with poly hives, you can't do that because they would melt. So you need another way of kind of cleaning these hives. The standard way of doing it is using soda crystals. These are really readily available in most shops, and a little packet like that only costs a pound, so they're relatively cheap. The problem that I have with the soda crystals though is that it's quite difficult to get the soda crystals onto the poly and keep it submerged in order to give it a good clean. So the system that I've developed, and I'm sure other— plenty of other beekeepers use this as well, Is to use a 200-litre old oil drum, and that way it means you can put the soda crystals in the water, give it a nice good stir, and then you can submerge your equipment in there. And it's quite a lot of equipment in there. You can submerge it kind of for 24 hours and then come back and clean it up at a later date. It saves a lot of time, and the fact that it's got a built-in lid makes it very, very easy to kind of keep the equipment submerged within the tank. So purpose of this video is I'm just going to give you a quick, quick demonstration of how I use the soda crystals, how I put my poly stuff into the drum, and how clean it comes out. So very quick video, and I'll show you what I do. So I've already got one pack of this in the drum. I find that for a drum this size, I've got 200 liters of water in here, I use 2 kilos, and that tends to work well for me. So all I do, I'll just empty that in. And then you want to get in there, give it a good stir. It will settle at the bottom, so you just need to make sure that you get all the way to the bottom and give that a good stir. And that's it, my poly hive. Um, what you need to do is bit by bit, you need to take it apart and put it in there. Making sure to take off anything that's not going to float. So the poly will float, which is fine. These, uh, the plugs and the plastic things won't float, so you don't want to put them in. You can just go and you do them in a separate tank in the house. So you pop them in, and as you can see, they float up. So this is the problem that you have, and this is why I've developed this system using the, uh, the oil tank, which makes it a lot easier. So you're taking off your plastic bits, they don't need to go in. Take out your plug, that doesn't need to go in. So what we're cleaning here today is a BS Polynuke 2-in-1. Um, seen quite a lot of action over the season, this one, as you can see on the GoPro footage. So we're just going to give that a good clean, um, and get it ready for the upcoming season. So again, as you can see, pop that in there. And it just bobs on the top. And the same with the rest of it. So you can see the problem that you would have. So this is why I've developed this system. So then the tricky bit is getting it all in and getting the lid on. Once you've done that, you can just leave it and it's fine. So the way that I like to do it is take the pieces out one by one. Put it all back together. Now, when you— when it's in there, this will fall apart and water will kind of reach into all the areas. Just put it in as a whole item like that. You then take your lid and you push it down. You're going to get a lot of water coming out now. That's what you want. You want it to overflow. Okay, so it's a bit tricky getting that on. You, um, a bit more difficult with the GoPro as well because I'm trying not to get it wet. Um, but once that's on, that's the hard bit done. As soon as you take it off, it's going to pop back up again. What you've done there though is you've got a completely full tank of soda solution And you've got your poly hive in there. So this could be your poly hive, or it could be your poly nuc, or any other poly equipment. Now, I spoke earlier in the season about using Swenty hives, and one of the huge annoyances with the Swenty hive is the fact that it's dovetailed and that you have to assemble it. Now, when you come to clean them, that is one of the best possible things that you can have because you can take it apart and you can fit a huge amount of kit in there. I've had up to like 10 to 15 supers in a single oil drum like this if you take it apart and stack them up nicely. So for the purpose of this video, I've kind of filled it up first and then popped the nuc in to show you kind of how it works. If I was going to go and do a real kind of full load of this, what I would do is I would put some— a few soda crystals at the base. I would then stack all of my equipment up into it. I would then put the lid on, and I've got a hole at the top, and I'd finish it off with a bit of soda, and then I'd put the hose in the top, and then you can just kind of give it a bit of a shake like that, and then once it's full, everything's submerged and you don't have that issue of trying to cram stuff down and it being buoyant and popping up. So all I do now is I leave that for kind of anywhere up to about 24 hours. The longer you leave it, the easier it is to clean, but the soda will kind of just work on that and kind of get any gunk or any wax particles or anything like that out of the Poly Nuke. And that's about it. So I'll pop back in a couple of hours and show you how clean they've turned. So I've given it a couple of hours. I'm going to open it up, have a look at how clean the poly is, give it a bit of a scrape, give it a brush and clean it, and then rinse it down and see how it comes out. So as you can see, there's quite a lot of pressure that builds up, builds up in there. So just stand back, it will splash you a little bit. So all I'm doing now is I just give it a brush. So all I'm doing now is just giving it a brush. The soda crystals have kind of broken down any of the gunk. It makes it very easy. And then I'll get a scraper, or you can use a hive tool. This is good for getting off the bits of wax. Give it a nice good scratch all over. I'll put that to one side. So I'll show you a bit of a kind of after. This is how it comes out. Most of the gunk's off. But obviously any of the hard bits of wax will still remain, so you just need to get in there with a scraper and get those off. And then onto the main hive body, just the same again. You just want to get around with the scraper, get everything off. Then what I'm going to do is I'm going to get a hose and I'm just going to kind of rinse all of these off. You don't want to use a pressure hose, it will really damage the poly. So all you want to do is just get the hose like that, give it a good spray, and that's it. So as you can see, it really kind of like cleans up very nicely. Um, I mean, I could go a little bit further and get every last kind of like remnant of any wax off, but you don't need them to be perfectly clean. I just do it just to get the kind of majority of the wax off, any grime, any kind of stickiness, and they come out really nice and clean like that. Again, you can see the feeders. I'm not going to spend my time kind of scraping off every single last bit of propolis. The bees will just propolise it again straight away. I'm just looking to get the majority of that kind of wax and any brace comb, any dirt, any grime, just so the kind of— the fondant plug fits a bit better. And yeah, it kind of keeps the hive looking nice and clean. So it was only in there for about an hour, and normally, like I say, I'd probably try and get 2 in there at a time, or if I'm doing actual boxes, I'll break them down and maybe get 10 supers in there at a time. If I'm doing it that way, I'll definitely leave them overnight just to make sure that kind of I'm getting every, every last kind of bit of grime off them. That can be used again though, so although that's a bit dirty now, we can just kind of go back in and put more supers in there. The soda will last a good few days like that. It'll probably last longer. I tend to drain it out after that, after 2 or 3 goes, because it does get a little bit messy. But don't think that once you finish the first hive you need to drain it and start again. Like, you can kind of keep on using it again and again and again. That solution will last for a long time to give you a lot more kind of cleaning power. So that's it for today's video. I really hope that this is something that you'll potentially have a go at, and it saves a lot of time. It means you don't have to kind of stand there and hold these really buoyant polyhives in the water. So have a think about getting an oil drum and modding it to be able to do this. Another video that I'll be doing very shortly is on how to make sugar syrup, and I also use this drum to make sugar syrup where I use cold water and a paddle mixer that I've modded to go into that hole in the top. So it's a really kind of multifunctional piece of kit that I use. Use it for cleaning poly using baking soda, and I use it for making up to 200 litres of sugar syrup at a time, which can save you lots of money, and it saves you kind of messing around with warm water on stoves and kind of creating heat within the sugar that, as we know, can create HMF. So it's a very neat solution for creating a very safe sugar syrup feed for your bees. So thanks again for watching, and I'll see you next time.
