How To Add Castellations To Abelo Supers - Glue, Screw or Stick?

Do not fix these in place until you see the end of this video. So castellations for me are really important if you want a very easy to manage honey crop. If you don't correctly space your honey frames, you'll struggle when you come to get the wax cappings off. Now there's loads of different types of castellations and loads of different numbers, really easy for people to get confused. You might see 12, you might see 11, 8, 9, or 10, but I'm here to tell you the easiest one to use for Everybody is tens. Now, what tens means for castellations in the UK is that it is space to hold ten frames in a standard national hive. However, the Abello hive—the walls are a little bit thicker, so I'm using tens castellations. But I have to cut the end off because it doesn't fit, so we only get nine frames in. It's totally confusing for everyone, and this video is going to make it so simple. The reason that people like eights or nines is that you can put really nicely drawn out combs. Into the 8s and 9s, and the bees will expand the frames out, and you get those super chunky frames that everyone loves to see being uncapped. However, the problem comes around when you try and put foundation in them, which a lot of beekeepers do. You put this in an 8 or a 9, and you come back, and there is going to be wild comb everywhere. All of my supers this year are on Castellations on 10s, and every single frame is pretty much perfectly capped. But more importantly than that, they've drawn it out beyond the edge of the frame, which means that when I come to cut it down, it's so easy. So how do you fit these castellations on a wooden national hive like this? You just pin them in place with some nails. You can see up there, 4 nails in all the way across, pinned to the right height to maintain that bottom bee space of the national. And then you can see I can just move my bars around to go into any one that I want. Now, different poly manufacturers have different ways of putting the castellations on. The Payne's one here has a slot in. It's not really designed for Castellations. It works well with Castellations. It's designed to put a metal runner in there so that the frames never come in contact with the poly, which again is a good idea and a really simple one to put the Castellations in. But you will have seen on the Abello frames like this, there is no such place to put the Castellations. There's nowhere that you can pin them because it's plastic. Until now, because take a look at this one here. This is an Abello Poly Super perfectly spaced on TENS Castellations. So if you're modifying a standard TENS Castellation to fit the Abello Super, It is as simple as this. You just cut off one castellation and make sure that the spacing on either end is then the same. That is what it looks like before I've made the final cut, and I'm just using a good pair of scissors here. But if you go through and cut the end off, so you can see all I've done there is just cut off one castellation, and then I've tried to maintain the sizing here and the sizing there. So I'll give you a close-up there. Don't cut here, don't cut there. I'm just going to cut straight through there. To give me that duplication of size. So you can see this end is now equal to this end here. And then how are we going to fix it to the plastic poly? So I've been using this glue gun here for years using Technobond hot glue. Oh my goodness, this is a hot glue gun and wow, it is powerful. It will stick anything pretty much to anything, but it is specifically designed to stick Stick stuff to plastic. There's 2 warnings here. One, if you burn yourself with this glue, it will really, really burn you. And 2, once it's set, you are not getting it off, full stop. So make sure you get the spacing right, and I'll show you exactly how to do that in this video. So I've got my glue gun set up, warming up there. You need to warm it up loads. What's really important when it comes to castellations is maintaining your bee space. So if you're doing it in Langstroth, you're going to have a space above the frames here called Top bee space. If you're doing that on a National box, which I suspect you probably will be if you're using an Abello hive, it's going to be bottom bee space, with one exception, which is the 12-frame National, because that one actually is top bee space. Here's the really easy way to remember: you are not changing the spacing here, and each one of these frames needs to sit in exactly the same position on the same runners as it did before. Do not let the castellations protrude upwards, and do not let the wooden frames The castellations are there just to space the frames. The castellations are not there for the frames to sit on. So what's nice about this system is that it is very, very quick. You just take your glue gun, put yourself a nice seam of glue all the way along. Don't need excessive amounts there. You just need enough that when you put that castellation on, it's going to spread out a little bit. Do not burn yourself. Then you want to place your castellation as symmetrically as you possibly can. Don't butt it up one way and don't butt it up the other way. You will see why in a little bit. Then place your constellation on and press down along there. You might get a little bit of glue coming through. Do watch out. It is so bad, this glue, for burning you. Now, if any of it curls up, you just hold it down a little bit there. This glue sets within maybe like 5 or 10 minutes, but you get a good hold within 15 to 20 seconds. So there we go. That's holding there now. And do you know what? I genuinely have not done this on purpose. I've left the frame too far up and I've just gone to move it after Oh, 10 or 15 seconds and it's stuck. So I'm just going to try and get this off. Wow! I promise you I've not set this up at all. Yeah, it's in the wrong position, so I need to get it up. This is why this glue is so good. Right, let's get it off. Geez Louise! Oh, that— look, it's taken the poly with it. Whoa. Now that might have looked like a really dramatic way to show you how not to do it, but you can see how quickly that's set there, that glue. Look at the poly damage it's done. But it is a good lesson for you because what we've got here is not set up correctly. So hopefully you should be able to see that. You can see just a tiny little bit of castellation Coming above the plastic there. That is not what we want. If the plastic comes above the castellation, you've done it wrong. You should look at it from this angle and all you should see is the original black plastic runner. So we'll do the same thing again, maybe a bit, a little bit quicker this time. Get my glue on, castellations in place, centralized, and I can see the rim through it on my end. That's exactly what you want. So that one there is done. All you do then is flip it over, go back in with the other one, and hopefully you can see now why I say to go symmetrical, to go exactly in the middle, because if you do that on both sides, you won't get any of this cross-framing like that. So before I show you how easy it is to get the frames in there and get it onto a beehive, let me show you what happens if you don't put the castellations in here. So this is 10 frames in here on a self-spacing DN4 in the same polyhive, and you can see how much of a gap there is. If I take this frame out here, this is the amount of frames that is in that castellated super. I've just got them at very prescribed spacing like this. Now, if you don't put castellations on and you just put this on your hive and you think it's all nicely spaced, you go and put it on like that, spacing's gone almost instantly. They all end up at that end. You get a big void with loads of honey in, and it's a real mess to deal with. Or even worse than that, they just keep on putting frames in. They'll fill it up something like that. And then when they come to extract the honey at the end of the year, they can't get down underneath the wax capping, so they have to get the fork out. It's really slow. It's really inefficient. Not good for you. Not good for the bees. There is a much, much better way. So you can see the spacing here works very, very well. What we're looking at is the space between the frames. Try and ignore the frames here. What we're looking at is that space, that kind of 1-inch space all the way along there. And the way that I've cut them and the way that I've done it symmetrically like this, these outer spaces are very, very similar to all of the inner spaces. That is what you want. This setup here is perfect. So I love doing videos like this showing you how to do new things, but really the proof is in the pudding. Let's get this box of castellated super frames onto the Obello Hive now, flood it with bees, and see how well they do. So at the moment I've got a brood box here, the queen's down there, loads of brood, queen excluder here. This super here has got pretty decent amount of honey on. This is my buffer super, so there is literally Nothing in it, which is brilliant for this video because it means I can replace it. Now underneath, the bees are doing very, very well indeed. You can see we've got lots and lots of honey being created here. So I've got my Abello castellated super. I think I'm going to place it underneath this box here, directly above the queen excluder, just because we've not got much time left in the season. I really want the bees to work this and get it drawn out full of honey and capped before the end of the season. So there we go. A little switch around. I'm back to my brood box with the queen. The queen excluder is in the same place. This is the new super with castellated frames, just with foundation. And then I put the honey up there at the top. This board here is just a solid crown board, so everything above it is completely irrelevant. And there's just literally a few bees in here, so I'll shake those bees out and I can leave that one up there for storage. So I'll fast forward a few weeks and we'll see just how well the bees have done with the castellated frames in the Abelo supers. So it's been a few weeks now. Let's get inside and see what the bees have done with those frames that are on castellations. And amazing to see that the bees are up here already working away. But as you can see, Everything is still in place. The castellations are well and truly glued on, and all we need to do now is wait for the bees to fully draw everything out, cap over that honey, and I'll show you why you need to do this on every single super box that you own. So let's take a look at what the bees have actually done. All of these frames here have been completely drawn out. Well, the ones in the middle have anyway. We go on to the next one, perfectly drawn out. Same on the next one there as well. Kind of get the idea. The bees have drawn them all out without any burr comb at all. So we are getting towards the end of the season though, and what I've got on this colony is another 2 supers in a similar situation, castellations. You can see here these are on 10 castellations and there's actually 10 frames in here. But if I left all of these boxes on the hives, I don't think I'd actually get any of them properly drawn out. So I need to compress these hives down, and I want to do that to get the Abello castellation finished first. So I'm going to shake out this entire box of bees here. So I've got my Abelo castellations going on first, and then all I'm going to do one by one, take out the frames and shake the bees in. So it's been about 6 weeks since I put those castellations in my Abelo super. I was really hoping we were going to be able to get to the end of the season, let the bees draw everything out, cap it over, and I could show you at the very end. It is now the back end of August. It is time to go in, do the harvest, get my Apivar strips So I'm just gonna show you where the bees have come up to, but there is a bombshell and you are not ready for this. But before we get to that bombshell, you need to see inside and see what the bees have done with the Abello castellated super. Both of the supers on here now are castellated. The wooden one is on 10s, the Abello one here is on 10s, but I've cut it down to 9. So they're pretty much identical and it gives us a good chance to compare the two. So you can see the bees in the wooden super have done very well. They've drawn it all out. They've not capped everything over yet, but they're Definitely starting to cap things now. You can see the bees working out from the center, and as always with castellations, the thing we're trying to do is to make that a really chubby section on that profile there. Got a few more frames like this where the bees are really trying their best to cap it over, but the season is just running out. And you know what, I don't think we're ever going to get to that point this year. Got to finish this video off. But more importantly than that, let's take a look what's going on in the Abelo Green Super with my homemade Castellations. Ow! But we're not worried too much about that. I'm worried about the Castellated Super from Abelo. You can see how much the bees have built the wax up above the line of the frame. This is about perfect. It means that when you come to cut down all of those wax cappings, because the frames protrude outwards, makes all of that uncapping so easy. So this has definitely been a success, but there is a bombshell that's been thrown into the mix here. Let me close this colony back up and I will show you. So literally 3 days before I was due to finish this video, one of my channel members messaged me on the emails and said, have you ever thought of working out a way of getting some castellations into the Abelo supers? And I thought, oh my goodness, what's coming next? He has sent me them and they are without a doubt 1,000 times better than my design. The reason they're so good, they're made of stainless steel. My ones are galvanized. My ones are permanent. You have to glue them in with hot melt glue. These ones are just perfectly bent and slot in like this. Oh, what a waste of a video. But it's not a waste of a video. This is everything that I am about. I tried to fix a problem and I'm not very good at fixing the problems well. Somebody else has designed and engineered a solution that is so much better than mine. And luckily I don't have too much of an ego. So the green box up there, that's my prototype. I've only done one super and I now have a brilliant solution that is not only effective, that it is removable and replaceable without doing any damage to the box. These are brilliant. So we're back to where we started, a plain Abello Super with no way of fixing castellations in. It's so nice playing with these. You do this with proper castellations, you'll cut your fingers off. These ones here are very high-end. And then what's so nice about these castellations as well, and what my other solution didn't have, was the ability to change the castellation number. So I went with a 10 because a 10 is a good multi-purpose number, But castellations on 8s, castellations on 9s are much easier to uncap. And people do think that you will increase the yield the lower number of frames because it's more efficient for the bees to fit the honey in the box. So this design here has so many advantages over my design. And all that you do is just place the castellations in like that. No screwing, no gluing. You don't even need to screw them down. And then all you do is you just take your frames. It's a bit frustrating having done all of this video and then someone coming along and Just gazumping me with an amazing design at the end of it. But I'm being 100% honest here, and I wouldn't do this video unless I felt like this. So this is what I am all about. Any iterative improvement on a design that can be achieved economically, get on the phone, get on the email, let me know. This really is absolutely brilliant. You can see no frames coming out whatsoever. But the beauty of this system here is it gives you the ability to change the castellation number. And that really is why this design is so much better than mine. So these castellations here, they're very much prototypes, not available on the market, and they might never be available on the market. But if you've got an Abello hive, if you've got a Lyson hive and you want to use something like this, stick it in the comments below and let me know. You never know, we can get these to market.