In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey explains how to meaningfully upgrade a wooden beehive by installing a poly Ashforth feeder, specifically the Abello model. He outlines the typical components of a wooden beehive kit and emphasizes that a feeder is often overlooked. Edwards details the feeder’s large capacity (10‑15 L), robust construction, and its dual function as both a syrup/fondant feeder and a replacement crown board, providing superior insulation for the winter cluster. He describes how flipping the feeder creates an insulated box for fondant feeding, reduces condensation issues, and eliminates the need for a separate crown board, saving cost and simplifying management. The video also covers the feeder’s compatibility with national hives (bottom bee space), ventilation, durability, and why it outperforms other feeder types (rapid, frame, entrance). Throughout, Edwards positions the poly Ashforth feeder as the single most valuable piece of equipment for new and experienced beekeepers, offering year‑round benefits that improve colony health, honey production speed, and beekeeping convenience.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you how to upgrade your wooden beehive. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. We like to upgrade everything in life. We upgrade our phones, we upgrade our cars, but do we really get anything out of it when we do these upgrades? Sometimes they're just for looks, sometimes they're for show, but in this video I'm going to show you how to get a real tangible benefit by upgrading your wooden beehive. So when you buy a beehive, pretty standard to get the kit like this. I know I've only got one super on this, but a wooden kit beehive— I always try to get cedar if you possibly can, and I like seconds because seconds is cheap. But you generally get a floor, a brood box, a queen excluder, 2 supers, and a roof. And then it's over to you to buy the frames, whether you want plastic or wax foundation, all of the other ancillary items that come with it. However, there is one thing that is always missed, something that you always need to buy when you buy a beekeeping kit like this, and that is the feeder. So that's what we're going to talk about in this video. How can you upgrade your wooden beehive? And my advice is to buy a poly Ashforth feeder. So here it is, this is what we're talking about, a poly Ashforth feeder. This one here is from Abello, But loads of different companies do various versions of this. There's a different one called a Miller feeder. My personal preference is for an Ashforth feeder. What it is though, it's a really big, sturdy top feeder that holds about 10 liters of syrup. Some of them go up to about 14 liters of syrup. It sits on the top of the hive, but what it gives you is numerous benefits over and above its ability to feed. So there we go. The beehive is now upgraded. I'm going to tell you why I think the biggest upgrade for your beehive is the Poly Ashforth feeder. So like I said, when you buy these kits, you do need to buy a feeder. Are you going to buy a 2-pound rapid feeder? Are you going to buy a big rapid feeder, a jumbo rapid feeder, a frame feeder, an entrance feeder? Maybe an idea for another video, which is which feeder is best, but there's no competition in it for me at all. It is an Ashforth feeder. I love my Poly Ashforth feeders. And I use them religiously across all of my hives. My hives, I use poly hives anyway, but I think the biggest upgrade on a wooden beehive is a poly Ashworth feeder. So what does a poly Ashworth feeder do? You can feed your bees syrup, 10 to 15 litres of syrup depending on which one you get. If you're going to make me make a decision and say which one is the best, by far and away the Abello poly Ashworth feeder is In my mind, is the best on the UK market. It is absolutely bombproof. I'll give you a really good close-up look of it in a little while as well. I'll show you the front, I'll show you the top, and I'll show you how it works, and I'll show you why I think it's a market-leading polyash forth feeder. But in terms of its usability, it's used to feed the colony with syrup. So you might be feeding them one-to-one syrup in the spring. You might be feeding them two-to-one syrup in the late winter. Invert syrup. Any type of syrup, you can feed that in a polyashforth feeder. What I do with mine as well, when I come to feeding fondant, so January, February time, if the colonies are low on weight, I'll flip that feeder upside down and I'll feed fondant in an upturned polyashforth feeder. So immediately you're getting 2 big benefits there. One is that you've got the capacity in your feeder to feed a lot of syrup at once. This helps when you're trying to get the colonies up to weight for winter. I like my bees to get up to weight really, really quickly. So you're getting a good capacity feeder. The next thing there is that when you're coming to feed fondant, what you need to do is you need to make sure that the environment in which they're eating that fondant is warm and that it's well insulated. And a Polly Ashworth feeder, by nature of its construction, is very well insulated all around. So if you turn it upside down, you've effectively created a big insulation box, and then you can just lay your fondant directly on the frames. The bees will work it so much better than, say, putting a crown board over it and then an upturned takeaway feeder. They really do go for it, and it gives you very rapid spring buildup. Now, you might be thinking, okay, why is that an upgrade on a wooden hive? It's just a feeder for feeding syrup and for feeding fondant. Now, I don't see it that way. I use these poly Ashforth feeders as my crown board. I say, I don't want a crown board. If you're going to buy your bits and your boxes in the sales, You can do away without a crown board. All of the colonies you see here, obviously not the Hyde Hives hives, they don't have crown boards, but every single colony that I own, I don't use a crown board. So if you say a crown board is going to cost you £7 or £8, I haven't actually checked what the latest price of a crown board is because I haven't used them for years. You can effectively scrap that cost because you don't need it, because you're going to use your polyash forth feeder as your crown board. And you might be thinking, well, It doesn't have a hole in it, so how do I feed? If you go back, we feed the fondant by flipping it upside down and giving you that insulated box. So it can do everything that a crown board does, but it's the most upgraded crown board you're ever going to get, especially for a wooden hive. And the reason is, is due to the nature of its construction, you've got at least 50 millimeters of insulation, really high insulation, polystyrene, exactly where want it in the beehive. In the summer months, you get that increased insulation above the colony of bees so they're not losing heat out of the place where they're potentially going to lose the most heat. Now you can do that by putting Celotex or other insulation panels in your roofs, but if you've not got deep roofs, then that causes a little bit of an issue, and you've got to go out and buy the Celotex anyway, and then you've still got to come up with a way of feeding. So for me, Celotex in the roof does solve the problem of insulation above, but why not do that with your feeder that you're going to leave on all year round? The next one though, and the biggest one for me, by far and away the biggest upgrade that you can get for your bees, is giving them this insulation above the winter cluster. It's a completely solid piece of insulation above the cluster, which means that the walls, the sidewalls of the hive, are going to be far colder So if you get any condensation condensing on the walls, you're going to get it on the sidewalls and not the roof, which means that the bees can manage that condensation so much better. And obviously, because it's condensing on the wood, the wood's just going to absorb that condensation. You're not going to see any pools of water in your hive, but also you're not going to have this drip, drip, drip effect on the bees, which they really do not like over winter. So there we go. That is how you upgrade your beehive. It's not a bling copper roof to make it look really cool. It's a real practical investment for you to make your beekeeping life easier, to make it a much more hospitable environment for the bees, to save you some money in the process because you don't need a crown board, and then just to make your life easier as well. The big benefit for me is that they live on the hive all year round. They've got their polyash forth feeders on. Some of them have got syrup in. Some of them are taking their syrup down. They stay on all the way throughout the winter. They're there in the spring if I need to feed 1:1 syrup to build that colony up, and then they remain on all the way throughout the summer, which helps the bees work those flows, get the honey capped a little bit quicker just because the hive is better insulated. So this is what the Abello Poly Ashforth feeder looks like, and you can see it's really, really well built, and I mean it is Built for decades worth of use. You've got stainless steel metal slot there. The bees come up that entrance and they go and feed down that slot. Fully ventilated, which will eliminate any risk of mold growing there. It comes pre-painted, painted on the inside with a masonry paint, and then all the way around the edge you've got this plastic mating faces. What I particularly like about the Abello Poly Ashworth feeder though is this bee space that they have at the bottom. So you can place this directly on a national hive. It is 100% compatible with a national hive. It's bottom bee space, so it gives you that spacing underneath or on top of those frames there, and then the bees just access up, up that slot, and they can get themselves lots of syrup very quickly. I'll just point out the center of this again. So this here is a really solid Good insulating polystyrene material. Obviously, any cold faces are off over to the edge over here. This is going to keep the bees really well insulated over winter. So good thing to point out there as well: the polyashforth feeder from Abello is 100% compatible with national beehives. You don't want something that you're going to have to bodge. The Swienti one is not completely compatible, and you need to put the rim of that bee space on top of the frames to make it work. But the Abello one is ready to go. So although the capacity is a little bit less than the Suyenti, it's a far better proposition in terms of longevity because it's so much better to use, but also the fact that it doesn't need to be modified because it's got the bee spaces correct from the beginning. So there you go, that's my number one tip for upgrading your beehive. I get the argument between poly and wood, but my number one piece of advice— if anyone says to me what's the one bit of advice or one piece of kit that you would give to any new beekeeper, I would say the Polly Ashford feeder. So I hope you found that video useful. 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.
