How To Hack A Swienty Brood Box - Beehive Hacks - Stop Bees Nibbling Edges

In this video, I'm going to show you how to hack the Suyenti polybrood box to make it a little bit better. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Obviously, in that intro, normally I'd say it's going to make it the best polybrood box in the world. Check out this amazing hack, it makes it perfect. And I'm just going to caveat it from the very beginning. I don't like the Swienty brood box. I've never liked it. This hack here though definitely makes it more workable, and if you've got Swienty brood boxes already, this is something that you can use to make that polyhive better. Doesn't mean that I recommend it over and above any of the other polyhives on the market. It still has too many frustrations for me to give it that recommendation. Now I've been working on this hack for a long time. I've got 100 of these boxes and I've been thinking about how to make this hack work. Then I was looking at the beekeeping forum the other day and somebody did the hack already, and they did the hack way better than I was going to do it. So I'm going to show you what I was planning because I only got really halfway through the hack, and I'm going to show you, with the permission of the person who posted on the beekeeping forum, the simple hack to make the Suyenti poly boxes a little bit better. So the problem with the Suyenti poly brood boxes, the poly's a little bit soft, so you do get damage. You can see some hive tool damage on this corner here. But I can live with hive tool damage. Obviously the other thing I don't like is that the size internally isn't enough for 11 frames. And with 10 frames you leave a little bit of a gap. But this hack here resolves a couple of things. And the main one here in terms of what I'm going to do for this hack is this nibbling away at the poly. You can just see it start to happen here. And it renders these boxes pretty much useless. Now I'm going to show you the hack that I thought I was going to do first. So the runner normally sits in this groove here and turns what is clearly a top bee space designed poly hive into a bottom bee space for the UK market. My hack was going to be to take out this runner and to fit it on there, to grind it down a little bit and get that sitting all nice and flush, and then that was going to stop the bees nibbling, and I was going to glue that on, a little bit of polyurethane glue, and I hadn't actually got to the point of working out what I was going to do for runners. It's going to probably work out some sort of frame system in there, maybe put some castellations in, probably not in the brood box though, but something just to lift this back up to bottom bee space. Now the hack that Da Boss has come up with on the beekeeping forum, great name by the way, is loads better than the hack that I was thinking of. So what he's done is he's split that out into 2 different elements. He goes away and he buys a strip of plastic to resolve the nibbling issue, And then the really clever thing that he does here is that he takes the internal runner, sticks a couple of toothpicks on the inside, and then glues it on at a bit of a jaunty angle to turn the boxes into top bee space. Now I'm gonna show you some screenshots now of the forum, of the pictures that are put on there and how it works. I'm doing it with his permission, of course, but I think that's a really, really neat solution. I'm not gonna do that on my boxes though, for one simple reason. And that is all of my floors have been designed for bottom bee space. So I think his solution's definitely better, and if I hadn't got hundreds of floors that were designed for bottom bee space, I'd probably go down that route. But to save me having to go and tack on a little strip and turn all of my floors to top bee space, I'm going to go with a slightly modified method, and that's what I'm going to show you in this video. So let me jump back in. I'm going to show you how I fix the nibbling issue, and I'm going to leave the runner in place and keep the brood box as a bottom space brood box. So on the beekeeping forum, Da Boss went off and got 19mm plastic strips. That's 2mm by 19mm as a single flat plastic strip. I couldn't find any of those. It was really difficult to find. So if you're watching this video and you can find some of those, let me know. All I could find was an L-shaped angle like this, and it was 20mm by 20mm. Luckily, they do these in Screwfix. You can get a 2-meter length for £2.99. So I'll be able to do 2 boxes for about 3 quid, £1.50 a box or 75p a runner. Really, really cheap mod. Luckily, this works as well as an L-shaped section, just as a flat section. So I'm gonna show you how this fits in now and resolves the issue of the bees nibbling the poly. So back to the brood box here, you can see on this side as well, I've got plenty of nibbling all the way along that edge. I've got some boxes that are so much worse than this, but you can see the runner's in place. That brings it up to a bottom bee space. I don't want to tweak that at the moment, but if you were to tweak it, you would take out the existing runner, place the toothpicks as we've seen on the picture there, and then it rests like that, and it's just elevated enough to be able to give you that space underneath the frame lugs and in order to turn that brooder box into top bee space. If you have it just flat like that, then what you end up with is you end up crushing bees under the lugs, which isn't good. So the addition of those toothpicks is a very minor touch, but it's a very clever touch. It just lifts it up to there, gives you the top bee space, and also gives you the space underneath the frame lugs, which is really important if you're going on a double brood box system. So all I'm going to do on my boxes here, I'm just going to take this piece of angle. I've cut it to length. You can see why he's gone for 19mm as opposed to 20. It does just sit a little bit proud, so you can get that off with a file, get it down. You want to make sure that that sits nice and flush. But you can see already, look at the difference there. You probably couldn't have seen the nibbling before, but that is going to well and truly stop the bees nibbling. It's going to eliminate any light that's going to come into that colony and start the bees nibbling, turning it into an entrance for themselves. I'm really happy about this. I think this is a really, Really neat solution. Right, so we've got some frames in it now, and you can see it fits in perfectly. Hardly any space whatsoever. You've still got the space underneath the frame lugs. Not going to be a huge amount of space, but the bees shouldn't propolize that up too much because they've got this walkway here. Might get a little bit of propolizing down there, but it shouldn't be an issue. You're definitely not going to get the squished bees because they've got somewhere to kind of get out of the way in this little channel here. If you're worried about that and this doesn't work— and I will update it if it doesn't work— you can just go back to the strips. I couldn't get the strips, to be perfectly honest. The strips is a better job here, maintains that space underneath the frame lugs. And that's it, the hack is complete. The bees shouldn't be able to nibble through here anymore. I'm going to grind that down, get it nice and flat, fix the problem of the bees nibbling through the sides of the Suyenti polybrood box. Right, so there we go. We fixed it. Final thing to say is if you're doing this in a double brood configuration, definitely go with a top bee space option. The way De Boss has designed that runner to be a top bee space runner eliminates another real big problem with the Swienty brood boxes, which is that if you double brood, you don't have the space above the frame lugs in order for the bees to move over, which means that when you lift up the top box in a double brood system. You lift out all of the frames in the box below. Really, really frustrating. The reason that doesn't matter too much to me is because I want a 14 by 12 single brood box system, so I can run everything at bottom bee space and I don't have that issue. If I was going back to double national brood, I would definitely adapt my floors for top bee space and go with the system that's top bee space, 'cause it makes it so, so much easier when you're maneuvering those boxes. So thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed that video. Thank you to the boss for letting me do this video. Much appreciated. Really, really good hack. As always, please hit the subscribe button. 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