Mini Mating Hive Review - A Complete Look At Bee Equipment Mating Hives For Queen Rearing

In this video, I'm going to review the Mini Mating Hive from Bee Equipment. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I've got the Mini Mating Hive from Bee Equipment and some black plastic foundation. That's what I'm going to review in today's video, take a look how it all goes together, give you my thoughts and recommendations for the product. So first thing to say with this mini mating hive, I bought this myself, so it wasn't given to me as a freebie. Bee Equipment aren't sponsoring this video, and this is my honest review and recommendations for the product, as with all of the product reviews here. I'm going to give you a top to bottom of the hive though, talk to you about the material, talk to you about why I bought these hives, how they work, how they fit together, and then we'll do follow-up videos later on in the year showing you how I'm going to use them. First thing I'll say though is apologies to anyone who's got an Abello mating hive. I am going to follow that video up later on in the year. I've still got one, I'm going to run it, I'll compare it to this one as well. Reason I sold them though is I just didn't have the space to keep them all safe, and I didn't have the time last year to do any queen rearing. I bought 70 of these, so the mini mating hives from Bee Equipment. I bought 70 of them because they were at such an incredible price in their sale. I paid £7.50 for each of these mini mating hives, so I just need to take that into consideration when you're comparing them to other competitors. Because these are considerably cheaper, and I do think that's replicated in the quality of the material. But I'll take a deeper look in this video. Right, so first thing, black plastic foundation. I'm gonna pop that over there for the time being because that doesn't come as part of the kit. This is all you get, and this is how they come. £7.50, a really small lightweight box. And my first impression of it was it's really light packaging-grade polystyrene. So there's no getting away from that. I'd say the first negative that I'm going to come to is the fact that it's relatively lightweight polystyrene, but I just can't be too hard on the manufacturer of these. You see these for sale, these are definitely made in China. I know Beer Equipment sell them, but a lot of other companies sell them as well. They're probably all made in the same factory in China, but you can't argue they're £7.50 each, so it would be really unfair of me to say the polystyrene is nowhere near as good as what you would get in an Appadato. Because an Apidea is probably 4 times the price if you get these at the right time of the year. However, what I will say about the material is it's not actually that bad. I had 70 of these delivered and one of them was damaged in the post, and it was a big crack. And I kind of think, you know, for the sake of one of them being damaged, I'm not even going to get in contact with Bee Equipment because that's probably not that bad a damage rate in terms of buying 70 and one of them's damaged. But you do get like bumps and scratches in the polystyrene. Because it is a little bit soft. Like, I can see it here. If I push my finger into it, I can make a dent with my finger. So I'm not sure what the density is. It's very lightweight though, so don't be thinking you're going to get a super hard, really tough, good quality polystyrene. It's a lower grade polystyrene, and that's reflected in the price. So hopefully you can see this here. There's no damage at all on that corner there. If I get my thumb in there and I do a little bit of a push, Hopefully you can see that it's just making that little indentation, and there's no problem with that. I really don't think that's an issue. I just want to be completely upfront in terms of the polystyrene. It's not the best polystyrene that you're going to get, and it is a little bit lightweight. Right, let's have a look on the top and the bottom of the poly hive, see how it all fits together. So as I said, it all comes in one piece, already assembled, no gluing. You don't have to do anything except paint it, and I would recommend a really good quality, tough Definitely not a polystyrene here that I would want to be messing around putting paint on. Could get yourself in a world of trouble spray painting this, so I would stick to a good quality masonry paint. So roof just pops off. Nice rebate on that roof as well. It's a good solid rebate and a really nice fit of the roof. You can see that that's important for a mating hive. You don't want anywhere that other kind of insects or wasps are going to be able to get in there and start robbing. Yeah, definitely. But as you can see, again, I'm just trying to open that up and I've just dented it a little bit. So just another shout out there to the, the level and the quality of the polystyrene. It's not the best, but I really don't think it makes a massive difference here. And especially for £7.50, you can't go wrong. So let's get that roof off again. You can see nice thick top of the roof. Really pleased with how thick that roof is. You compare that to like a Poly Nuke roof, it's similar thickness actually. So quite happy with that. And then when you start to squeeze it on a bit of a thicker piece, again, you can see tiny little dents coming up there. You can see where I'm pushing it, but it's holding together reasonably well. So I think it's going to be relatively durable. Definitely not going to be as good as an Apidea, but like I said before, it's about 25% of the cost. Now we'll get inside to the rest of it, but as you can see, you've got a bag full of bits and then a couple of polystyrene inserts underneath. Pretty standard. You've got a tray The tray's got some ventilation and it's a little bit tough to pull out. So what I'm going to do with my one, I'm going to run that through with a little bit of Vaseline just to make that easier, because you need that to be able to come in and come out really nice and easy. But good to see they've got the ventilation in there. Ventilation can be a bit of an issue with these mating nucs when they get too big. And good to see that you can actually take the bottom out because that's the easiest way that you're going to stock this with bees. Right, so I've just put the nuc off to one side for a sec. You get a plastic bag full of bits, lots of different bits. So I'm just gonna go through the bits that you get in there, 'cause it can be a little bit confusing to know where they all go. What I really, really like about this nuc though is that it's got plastic frames. I know I'm not a massive fan of plastic, but one of the things that I just can't get on with with mini mating hives is where you have wooden top bar frames and you're sitting there trying to melt on wax foundation. I find it really tedious, really time-consuming, And then you put bees on it and the wax falls off. There will be people out there that are a lot better than me than that, but I do like a fully made-up frame when I'm using mini mating hives. I find it so much easier. And I took a gamble on this hive. I really did take a gamble because what I wanted is I wanted a plastic foundation to fit in well and for me not to have to mess around welding it in place with wax. And although Bee Equipment and other companies do recommend you do that, I'm going to have a go at not sticking it in with melted wax because I think I might be able to get away with it. Anyway, back to this bag. Let's see what bits and pieces we've got in here. Right, so in the kit you get 9 of these parts, and these make up the frames. So these 3 over here, they're the top bars, and then these 6 over here, they're the side bars. I'll show you how they go together in a second. Then over here, this bit goes on the entrance. You can take it down to a single bee space entrance. This one here is to stop the queen getting into the feeder, and then this one here is a piece of ventilation. I'm going to put them all together now, show you how it all fits together. Right, first off, the small queen excluder. As you would imagine, that just pops in straight into where the feeder is there. That will stop the queen getting into your feeder. If you're going to feed syrup or you're going to feed fondant, you don't want your queen getting in there. So the first thing that goes in is this queen excluder. So you can see that there, that just sits in between that slot. You can take it out, put it back in again. Really nice fit, very simple. Another thing to notice is the feeder is removable. Always like to have a removable feeder here. Does make it easier, means you can take it out, fill it up, put it back in again. You can feed fondant in there, you can feed syrup in there. Good lightweight feeder. Make sure you give it a good paint on the inside and the outside. And again, I would be looking to put Vaseline in these slots here just to make it easy to get in and get out. Another thing to note while that's out is that if you take the feeder out, you can add extra frames in here to make this a 5-frame nuc. With the feeder, it's only a 3-frame nuc. So maybe later on in the season, you want to add a couple of extra frames in when the bees are on a flow. Can make them a lot more manageable actually, these kind of nucs, if you give them that extra space. So always nice to have a feeder that is removable. Next part of this little plastic package is your queen excluder. Obviously very important in a mini mating hive if you're using it just to rear queens. Once you get that queen mated, you don't want her swarming away or absconding. So that just slides in. Not the best design, but something I guess I can live with. It just slots in there, and then you can open it up for the bees to come in and go out. So if you ever want to close up the nuc, you can just slide that completely down, and that closes it off completely. Also brings me on to the final piece of this little jigsaw puzzle, which is the ventilation that sits up here, and that just sits in that slot, which means that if you close that entrance up like that, the bees are still fully ventilated. You're probably going to leave it sitting like that at the very beginning, either with the queen excluder in, queen excluder out. If you've got it open though, you close up that ventilation, and then if you want to bring it down a little bit as well, you can open the ventilation And still have the entrance open. So not too bad a design, but for £7.50, you can't complain. So there we go, there's the 3 bits. You've got the queen excluder stopping the queen going into the feeder, you've got the ventilated mesh that sits there that gives you the ventilation, and then you've got the queen excluder entrance that sits in that front slot there. So hopefully that was useful if you weren't sure what those bits were. I do reckon they're self-explanatory, but sometimes it's nice to see it on a video. Right, making the frames then. This is why I was really keen on this hive, because the frames go together so, so easily. You've got grooves on one side. Obviously the grooves need to face inwards, and all you do, you just pop them together with the grooves facing inwards. So that's it, that's that completely put together. Now I know it seems a little bit strange, there's no bottom to it, but that is a completed frame. And the machining of the plastic, really nice. It's good quality plastic in terms of It's nice and thick and it fits together well. So no issues at all with the plastic. Really, really happy with that. So this is what a completed frame looks like. There's your sidebar with the grooves facing inwards. Over on this side, again, you've got your grooves facing inwards. And then you've got your top bar there that's got the curved spaces to allow you to place queen cells in without taking that crown board off. It's an important note, that crown board as well, because I bought this mini mating hive without a crown board for 2 reasons. One, the version that adds in a simple piece of plastic was about £12 more, so I thought I'm definitely not paying £12 for a crown board. And I also read reviews saying that the crown board holes were in the wrong place. So I've got loads of cheap plastic that I get from my Payne's polynooks. I'm going to cut those up, I'll drill the holes in the correct place. Really cheap way to do it, and I'll show you that later on in the year when I make up crown boards. Right, on to making up the frames then. So once you've put together your plastic frames like this, I highly recommend the black plastic foundation from Bee Equipment, and the reason I do is because it fits. And I took a gamble on this. I wasn't 100% sure. It's not perfectly clear on the website if it works, but I can say now it definitely, definitely does work. So what they recommend is you take this black plastic foundation, you pop it into the frame, and then you get some beeswax, melt it down, and connect it all together with that plastic. Now if you're doing this in a belt and braces way, probably best to do that. It really is best to get it all connected up with nice melted beeswax, and it adds to the kind of attractiveness of the beehive as well to the bees if you're putting that wax in. However, when you put these little mini wax foundation strips in, you will see that they don't fit perfectly like that. They fit in, and I kind of bought these and thought, that's really annoying because I'm going to have to stick them all together again now. Really frustrated with this. I've just bought 70 of these. They told me that they fit, or it was kind of a little bit cryptic, because when you open it up like this, they kind of fall out a little bit. So I was thinking, this is a bit frustrating. I'm gonna have to get the melted wax out, stick them all together, and then it will work. However, when you take one of these little frames like this and you put it down into the hive, the side walls of that frame, when it goes into the hive, push together like that and just lock everything into place. So there is no possible way that that black plastic foundation is going to fall out once you get the frame into the hive. And once you get the frame into the hive and you put all of your bees in there, you feed them, you start getting them to draw out that frame, they're going to stick everything together for you. There's going to be no problem whatsoever. So I can definitely vouch for this. This works. The plastic foundation that comes in the little boxes of 10 Fits with this mini mating hive perfectly, but you do need to make sure that you get the one that doesn't have the crown board. I believe the one that has the crown board, slightly different dimensions. Need to make sure that it's the correct mini mating hive. So just to give you a little quick close-up of that black plastic foundation, it's wax coated. You can see the wax on it already, healthy coating of wax on there. And then hopefully you can see that as well when it's sitting in the frame like that. You've got the void at the top, void at the side, Doesn't really seem to work. But if you take that and put it into your little mini mating hive, once you get it in there, everything locks together. You can see no gaps anywhere now, no gaps on the side. The sidewalls of the frame are flush and touching that mini mating hive. It's gonna work really, really nicely. So I'm just gonna put together the rest of these frames now. I'll do it in real time as I'm talking, 'cause that is so quick to put together. Take out another little piece of wax foundation, just popping it in, and that's done. And I'll leave that in real time, so excuse the editing. I wanted to show you how quick that was because a lot of these frames, a lot of the systems, is a little bit of a faff. And I've played around with a good few of them. I do have various of these mini mating hives at home, and I have to say, I'm a really, really big fan of this design of the little plastic frames, especially in collaboration with this wax foundation that they've cut perfectly to size. Not perfectly square, the foundation, so if you're putting it in one way and it doesn't fit, you need to turn it around 90 degrees, and then again, that just slots in there like that. And that is the mini mating hive complete, everything in place now. So this is what the mini mating hive looks like now. You can see you've got all of your frames in place, you've got your holes either side there, and that's where I'm going to cut out the hole in the crown board so I can just go in, pop a little queen cell in without even opening up that crown board. Makes it really, really easy managing them if you can do that. So there you go, that's my first look at the Bee Equipment mini mating hive. Lots of companies do sell these, but Bee Equipment do do them at a very good price. I'm going to run these this year. I've bought 70 of these, so you'll probably be seeing quite a lot of this little mini mating hive. I'm going to reserve judgment on it for the time being though, other than to say, for what I can see, for £7.50, it's quite a good price. It's obviously a budget offering, but the design is good. The design of the frames is good. You can get the wax foundation to go with it, the plastic wax foundation. Don't get the crown board version. I would suggest making up your own crown boards, get those holes in the right place. The polystyrene, not perfect, but for £7.50, it's really not bad. I think I'll get a decent amount of use out of these if they're stored well over winter. That's going to be where you're going to have big issues with these if you do get like rats or mice problems in the winter. They'll chew through these really, really quickly. I think though they're going to be a good investment for me, and I think I'm going to get loads of queens mated. In the summer season. Like I say, I'll reserve judgment on this one yet until I've had a couple of seasons with it, just to see how it goes in terms of its durability. But from first impressions, it looks okay. 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.