Paynes Poly Hive Review

Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to review the Paynes Polyhive. Now before I review this hive, please take a look at our brand new website honeybeeBay.co.uk. It's an online beekeeping marketplace connecting buyers and sellers, so take a look and see what it's about. Right, the Paynes Polyhive. So as you may notice on this channel, I'm steadily getting through all of the various polyhives on the market. Today I've got the Paynes polyhive. So I bought this direct from Paynes. I went for their B-grade polyhive, which means that there's a couple of slight dings and dents in it. Really no issue with it at all. These polyhives, they get dings and dents in it within a few weeks use anyway, so I've got no problem buying them for a little bit cheaper directly from Paynes with a few dings and dents. So I paid for this hive completely myself. And I'm going to give you my full and honest review. So in this video, we're going to go from the top all the way down to the bottom. We'll talk about the roof, the crown board, the supers, the runners, the queen excluder, the brood box, and the floor. We'll talk about how it all connects together, how it integrates with wooden national equipment, and I'll give you my review and feedback at the end. Right, so the first thing to say with all poly hives, they need to be painted. So this one comes not painted. Like a lot of them do. My personal preference is for the hive to come not painted. It saves quite a bit of money and it means I can paint it in any colour that I want. Now it is quite nice though still when a hive does come painted and if you can get it in the colour scheme that you're working with then great, but if you're adding on say £20 for painting of the hive, I always prefer just give it a quick once over with some spray paint. Takes me about 30 seconds to a minute to spray a whole hive, so I prefer my poly hives to come like this, unpainted and as cheap as possible. Next thing to say about this hive is it comes fully assembled, and it really does save a lot of time. You might have seen in the previous review from Maysmoor, I had to get glue everywhere. I had to use screws to hold it all together. This one, fully assembled, ready to work directly out of the box. Really do like that. The other really important thing to note about the Paynes Poly Hive is the exterior dimensions of the hive. It's not compatible in that it's the exact same exterior dimensions as a wooden hive. It's slightly different, and you do get a bit of a lip if you put wooden National equipment on any of these boxes. So I know it's the same slight pet hate that I had with the Maysmoor hive. It says it's fully compatible, and I guess it is. And a few people commented on that video saying, well, hang on, it is compatible because I use it with wooden boxes. And all I'm saying is it doesn't look particularly neat. So you get this stepped-in, stepped-out effect. It's not perfect compatibility, although you can use wooden components with the Payne's components and they do work. The bee space is correct between the frames. It just looks a little bit messy. So I think I'll retract the statement that I said from the Maysmoor video saying that they don't work together and they're not compatible. That's not what I was trying to get across. All I was trying to say is on the website for Payne's and for Maysmoor, it says that they're fully compatible. And both of them fully caveat it with the fact that the exterior dimensions are different. But I just wanted to show that difference in dimension because I think it is quite substantial, and it's worthwhile seeing that difference before you go ahead and purchase any of these hives. In terms of functionality, there really isn't a major issue. I'm going to run both of these hives, so the Paynes hive, the Maysmoor hive, I'm going to run them all the way through the year. I'm going to do a bit of mix and matching with some wood, and I'm going to show you those lips, and I'll, I'll I'll report back on any water ingress or any issues. Coming from the feedback from people that watch the channel though, it should be fine, and it's more of just an aesthetic issue as opposed to any functionality issue. Right, so into the Payne's Polyhive review. Like I said, we're going to go roof, crown board, supers, queen excluder, brood box, and floor. We're going to go through them one by one. I'm going to tell you what I like about them, tell you what I don't like about them, and then just give you a little bit of feedback at the end in terms of whether I think the Payne's Hive is a good So we start off with the roof, and it's got a really nice kind of scalloped edge, very different. I don't— this is the only hive that I've really seen that has this curved edge on it. It's purely aesthetic, but it— I think it looks quite nice. It is a telescopic roof. Again, it's an American term, but that means that the roof overhangs the box. That's good for water ingress, although it does slightly increase the footprint of the hive, and with the panes, you're already talking that it's quite a large box. Yeah, it's a big box. Quite a big exterior footprint. Now just lifting up the Paynes poly hive, immediately it feels a little bit different to the Maysmore one, and I do think that there's a little bit more meat in the Paynes boxes than there are in the Maysmore. I'm going to do a comparison video, so the Maysmore boxes versus the Paynes boxes, and we'll go through all of the, the key differences between the two and do a bit of a comparison video. But just that gut feeling is there is a little bit more meat in the bones of this one. I think the density of the poly is the same, so it's 100 grams per liter density, but it just feels like there's a little bit more there. You've got your built-in hive strap, which is a bit of a gimmick, but no issue with that being there. And then you've got your imprinted details saying that it's from Pains. Personally, I would do away with both of those. I know they're probably built into the mold as it is at the moment, so there's no real issue with keeping it there. But as somebody pointed out on the Maze More video, This injection here, it is a bit of a breeding ground for crud, and water gets in there and it can get a bit mucky. So 2 or 3 years down the line, this isn't going to look so clean. The same with the strap. I personally, I think if you could do away with it, it's such a recognizable poly hive anyway. I don't personally think you need the details on the top. It's quite difficult to read it anyway. Not sure it adds much value. So around the edges here, you've got about 15mm of poly that goes down. Very Very similar to the Mazemore, and then you've got a lip that holds it up above the box. And I really do like that because what that means is you can effectively use this poly roof without a crown board. And I think that's a much, much better way, and we'll get on to this next, than actually using a clear crown board like this. So you've got a single built-in bee space all around this rim here. So the poly would sit on this edge, 2 mating faces together, And then you've got a single bee space on the roof. So I'm going to run this one without the clear crown board because I think it'll work a lot better like that, and the bees can move freely over the top of the frames. So I quite like the roof, and I really do like that indentation on the top of it that allows the bees to move over the frames. So pretty basic, but it's a good roof. So the next thing that comes with the hive is this clear crown board, very similar to the Maysmore one. It's a floppy crown board. It's built really for a top beespace hive. You can use it on a bottom beespace hive like this, so it will sit flush like that. The bees will propolise it down and they can't access or walk over the top of the frames. Now it's not a major issue, they can get around the sides, and all it means is that you just need to smoke the bees off when you're putting this back on to avoid crushing any bees. So it does work. I see loads of beekeepers using this on bottom beespace hives. On a top beespace hive, It probably wouldn't even work very well either because you might get a little bit of sag in the middle, and then they brace it down. Personally, I wouldn't bother using that. I just put the roof straight on top, and I think that'd be a much more efficient way to use this kit. I've actually gone ahead and bought the Payne's Polyfeeder as well, just so I've got a compatible feeder, and we'll do a separate review on that. But that fits directly on, and like all of my other hives, I'm just probably going to leave that Payne's Polyfeeder on top all the year round. Gives me added insulation on top where I want it most means it's there when I need it, and it just keeps all of the kit in one nice neat container. So we'll move on to the supers then, and the first thing I thought when I picked up this Pains Poly Super was there's considerably more meat on the bones. Definitely comparing, say, the, the Suyenti where they've really reduced the wall thickness. The Pains, that is the wall thickness there, At the narrowest point, and then that is the wall thickness there at the thickest point. And as you can see, you've probably got a good 60mm, 65mm maybe of thickness on the thickest point. And then even on the thinnest point on the hive, which is the same on all 4 sides, you've got between 50 and 60mm of poly. Now that's really good, and that is the whole point of going for poly hives, is that they're going to give you really good insulation benefits. So I was quite surprised, to be honest, with the Payne's. I was thinking it was going to be very, very similar to the Maysmore one, and the Maysmore one probably has more poly than the Suyenti, or it definitely does. Really quite impressed with that. There's quite a considerable amount of poly in there. It does add to the weight a bit, so if you lift it up, you can feel that it is substantially heavier than, say, a Suyenti Polysuper. But yeah, this is what we want, is we want good insulation properties without adding additional So next thing to say about the poly super, and this applies to obviously the other super and the brood box as well, they're not the exact same size as a wooden national, so they're considerably bigger. It's around 500 millimeters square, so it is actually compatible with the Maysmore poly supers. It's nice you can mix and match Maysmore and Paynes really, really easily. So as you can see, you can mix and match the Paynes and the Maysmore absolutely perfectly. It's the exact exterior footprint, which is 500mm by 500mm. So if you've got Maysmore hives and the Paynes have got a sale on the supers, you can add the supers on and vice versa. So if you want to do a bit of mix and matching with that, you can. Fully, fully compatible with the, with the Maysmore brood boxes and the Maysmore supers. Now there's a little bit of an issue in terms of compatibility with the floor, but I'll hold that back until the end of the video once we get down to the floor. And there is a little bit of an issue that you need to be aware of. So in terms of compatibility with the wooden National, as we did on the Maysmoor video, it fits. The B-spaces are correct. The internal dimensions match, but the exterior dimensions don't match. This means you get this overlap effect, and it just doesn't look very pretty. So in terms of function, it's compatible. In terms of looks, one is considerably bigger than the other. So don't think when you're buying a Payne's hive that it's fully compatible in terms of size and function. You do get this overlap and it maybe can cause issues in terms of water sitting on these surfaces. But I actually noticed what Payne's have done here, and again, it's a really clever little design, is they've put a bit of a sloping edge on the face of these boxes here. So it means that any water coming down on the side here will go onto these edges and track away down the end of the hive. So they've already looked at that and thought, well, there's potentially an issue there. The water might sit on the edge. So we'll just put this little sloping face on here and that sloping face will help track water away. So I think with the Pains, the issue is purely aesthetic. I really don't think there's much of an issue using a wooden National Super on top of any of these boxes. So the runners that come on the Pains poly boxes are very different from the Maysmore as well. So the Maysmore one has the integrated poly runners. And then you can add castellations in or add your own runners in. Pains go down a completely different route and they add in a metal runner. And it is a standard national metal runner, but they use it with a slightly different purpose. So you can see it's just a standard national runner, and all you do is you just take that and you pop it in the slot. Doesn't matter really which way around you get it, just as long as it sits in there nice and tight. And you put that on both sides and you can take your frame and then the frame Sit directly on the wooden national runners, bringing it up flush with the mating face, which means it's a bottom bee space hive. So in terms of a design feature, I really like that. One of my pet hates with the Payne's Poly Nuc is that you can't put runners on it, or you've got to attach them yourself, and it's a bit of a faff. With this one though, you, you— they slot right in. It's clearly been designed to work with a metal runner, gives you the perfect bottom bee space. But then the best added benefit that you get is that it's metal, so you're not going to get any wear on your runners. You're not going to get— even with a poly runner, you could stick down the frames and then pull it up and damage the runners. With the Payne's Polyhive, you're not going to get any of that. All the wear and tear is going to be on the metal runner. They're going to easily outlast the boxes, which can last for 30 to 40 years. It's a really nice design. It's strong, it's simple, and it's effective. Final thing to say about the Payne's Poly Super is you have handhelds on all four sides, and what's nice is you actually have two handhelds on either side. So you've actually got you can hold it there, you can hold it there, you can hold it there, or you can hold it there. And that's really nice. Again, it's it's quite a clever design because not everyone wants to lean right over and hold it in the middle. You can hold it pretty much in the middle, or you can hold it on one side like that. A lot of people do hold it like that. So you're not reaching over. And then also, if it's really heavy, you can hold it like that and hold it into yourself. So it's a really nice design, means you can attack it from any angle, whether it's like that or like that, the warm way, the cold way, pretty much covered in all directions here. So I remember looking at the Payne's Polyhive and thinking, looks a bit weird, weird shapes and angles and chamfers and handhelds. Actually, having got my hands on it now and I've had a look at it, You can see it's a really well thought out design. The handhelds are in the right place. The runners are in there to give you extra protection when you're moving frames. You've got the nice little chamfers to track away any water when you're using it with wooden national kits. It's a really nice design. So I have to say I'm very impressed with the Paynes Polyhive. Right, so the next super is obviously the same as the other super. So then supplied in the kit that I got from Paynes comes a standard wooden national queen excluder. It's not an oversized one, so there is a bit of a lip, but it does work, and it means that you're not restricted to using only the oversized ones, which I said on the previous review of the Maysmoor Hive. I didn't actually try it with a 460 by 460 queen excluder. It would have probably worked as well, but it's— I'm not a massive fan of interchanging between the two. I think it's nicer just to have a format and stick to it and for everything to work together nicely. Stops things moving around, definitely eliminates any chance of water ingress, and it's just a little bit easier on the eye. So it comes with a standard plastic excluder, but as you can see, the plastic excluder doesn't quite fit around to the edges, but it will stop the queen getting up there because it manages to go all the way over the interior dimension of the hive, which is the important dimension. Right, moving on to the brood box then. And the brood box obviously is very similar to the super. There's nothing different about it other than it's a little bit deeper. One thing I would say though is I think maybe the handhelds are a little bit low, and it's one of those things that if you move the handhelds up here, people will moan and say— people like me will moan and say you're taking insulation away, you're trying to streamline it and make it cheaper. But I do find it's a little bit quite hard to get your hand all the way around there to lift that up, and I've got quite big hands. So you're probably forced to pick it up in a little bit of an awkward way. Maybe a way to improve that would just be to put the handheld and then to fill it back out with poly at the bottom. So you've still got the same mass, you've just got the handheld in a slightly different area. Appreciate though, to change the mold just for that is very expensive. I can understand why Pains don't do that. But it has all of the nice functions that the Super has. So it has the metal runners to give you the bottom bee space. You've got these nice chamfers on the edge there. So if you're working with wooden national kit, it will track the water away so it's not coming into the hive. Got handhelds on all 4 sides, 4 different positions to get your handhelds, and it's really thick and really big and strong and quite heavy, which I know that one of the benefits of poly is that it's light. This is definitely heavier and chunkier than the Maysmore equivalent. Which in my view is a good thing. It gives you more insulation and it really helps the bees overwinter well on less stores, and it helps them build up really quick in the spring. So apart from the dimensions of the Payne's Polyhive, something that I'm not overly keen on, I'm really struggling so far to find any major fault with it. I really like the roof, the supers, and the brood box. I don't think I've got much of an issue with at all. Now the floor I've got a couple of issues with, and they're only minor issues, again quibbles, but one of them, it really frustrates me. So we'll move on to the floor now and I'll talk to you about my minor quibbles with the floor. Right, so before we move on to the floor, I just need to touch on something that's on the bottom of the brood box because it links into what I'm going to talk about on the floor. But you have a rebate on each corner, and at first I thought, why is there a rebate here? It's a really strange place to put a little rebate. And what that does is it locks it into the floor. And it's not trying to lock you in in terms of financial or a monopoly on the market. They've done it to stop it slipping around. That's the only reason I can think as to why they would have put this rebate here. So when you put it down onto the box, if you put it like that, it doesn't sit flush. You have to turn it and then you see it lock in like that. Now, I'm not keen on that rebate for one simple reason. And that is if I go and put a Maismore brood box on this hive, it doesn't work. So I'd either have to cut rebates, strange-shaped rebates, into a Maismore box to get it to work, which I definitely don't want to do, or I'm going to have to start cutting off the rebates on the Paynes box. And you can do that, there's nothing wrong with cutting the rebates off the Paynes box and then it's compatible with other pieces of kit, but it's one of those things, it's a piece of design that I just don't think is necessary. A floor and a box, they're not going to fall apart. The supers and the brood boxes don't fall apart. You can strap them up, you can put a brick on them. All of my other kit doesn't have these rebates on. I don't think it's a required piece of design, and it's just a little bit frustrating because so far really didn't have any issue with anything apart from the exterior footprint. And then you come to that and you just think that's a little bit, a little bit sloppy on what otherwise seems to be a really well Thought out and well-designed poly hive. So if I was going to start this one again, I would just take off those rebates, just cut them off with a hot knife. Or if I was going to amend the mould, I would just take off the rebates here and add that material onto the brood boxes. And then you can use any other brood box, be it a wooden National or a Maysmoor one, with this poly hive floor. So other things to say about the floor then. It's solid, it's really big and heavy. You can guess what I'm going to say about the landing board. It's got a nice thick, solid Correx underfloor insert, and that insert gives you enough room in order to be able to put it in and take it out without knocking off all of the stuff that's on it. Because if you're doing any varroa treatments or you're doing any mite drops, you want to be able to take that board out and actually analyze what's on the board, as opposed to when you take it out, it all gets scraped off. So there's a little bit of play in that. Really like that. They've just thought about it. They've just got the right depth board in place for it, and I like that. Other things to note, you've got the Varroa mesh screwed down, and this is like a plastic-coated Varroa mesh. It's a little bit sloppy. It's not quite as good as the Maysmoor, in my opinion. I don't think they've got much silicone holding it down, and as you can see there, it's just a little bit sloppy. It'll do its job fine, but I was impressed. The further I go down, the less impressed I am with the kind of just the little bits of finish. But that might just be my version. This is a Grade B version, so this might be the reason that it was rejected. So please don't think I'm just nitpicking over a Grade B item. That is perfectly acceptable and there's no issue with that. If I wanted to, I could just add another screw and everything would be fine. I'm nitpicking. Nice to see though that it's fully screwed down. If anything happens to the mesh or it gets broken, I can just unscrew it and replace it with some new Varroa mesh. Right, 2 more things to say about the floor. I'm going to save my really frustrating one to the end. Entrance reducers. Now, this plastic entrance reducer comes with the hive, which is nice. It just fits in there and it gives you a very small entrance for the bees to block it off if they're trying to reduce against wasps. When you're running it early in the spring and early in the summer and you've not got the issue of wasps, you can run it fully open like that. When it starts to get to wasp season, You can put this entrance reducer in and you can reduce it right down to a really small size. And then if the wasps get really bad or it's winter, you can close it like that and you've effectively got a mouse-proof hive. So again, it's a really nice, well-designed entrance reducer. It's plastic, so it's not going to rot, should last for ages, and it comes ready to fit the Payne's Polyfloor. Right, the final thing to say about the floor Is the landing board is vast. It's absolutely huge. I reckon you would chop off 30% of the weight of that poly floor by taking away that landing board. In my view, and I know that people do like landing boards, my personal opinion, I don't like landing boards. I think you could take all of that landing board away, reduce the weight by 30%. I Hopefully reduce the price a little bit as well because you're taking away a significant amount of poly, and it— there would be no detriment to the hive whatsoever. In fact, it would be considerably better because you're adding this additional footprint to an already really big hive, which means if you're stacking them up, taking them out to the heather or the oilseed rape, you're going to be able to fit a lot more in your trailer or your van. I would say even in a standard pickup, this is going to be the difference between getting 4 hives in the back of your pickup and 6 hives in the back of your pickup. This big landing board here is at least 150 millimeters wide and about 100 millimeters deep in the thickest spot, maybe 80 millimeters deep in the thickest spot. So with this hive, I will leave it as it is. I'm going to keep all of my polyhives as they are. I'm not going to amend them. I'm going to do a catch-up review 1 year later at the end of the season once I've had bees in these hives for 1 year. But if I was going to go down the route of buying a lot of Payne's hives, I would look at probably chopping off that poly. Payne's, if you're watching this video, I really do like your hive. In a future iteration, I would like to see that landing board removed, maybe replaced with an underfloor entrance or something else, maybe an interior landing board. So all you're doing is moving that landing board back underneath the hive, so you've got an interior landing board on an underfloor entrance. You'd save so much poly, you'd save money, and I think it'd be a really nice neat design. So there you have it, that's my review of the Paynes Polyhive. We've spoken about the roof, the crown board, 2 supers, queen excluder, brood box, and the floor. I've told you about the things I like, and I've told you about the things I'm not overly keen on. Now if I was going to redesign this hive myself, we take away the exterior footprint because they're going to go down that route anyway, they're already stuck with that. So I think you can't change that back to an exterior wooden national footprint. So if you took that aside, all I would do to this hive is 2 very minor amendments. And what's nice is I can do both of these amendments at home with a hot knife. So I would remove the rebates from the bottom box and the floor just so they sit flush, so I could use it with a Maysmore box, I could use it with other boxes, and I would remove that landing board Just to try and save a little bit of money on the landing board poly, but also so you can get more hives into a specific area, for example, the back of your truck. So that's about it for the review. I hope you found this one helpful. I have to say, I'm really impressed with this hive. When I bought it, I kind of thought I'm just going to do another review similar to the Maysmoor one, and I didn't hate the Maysmoor one. It's just that lack of compatibility with the other parts that I do find a little bit annoying. I thought the Pains was going to be identical. I really didn't think there was going to be much in there at all. It's the same kind of polystyrene, 100 grams per liter. They look similar. They've got a similar landing board. I thought this review would be it doesn't really matter which one you get; they're going to be kind of similar. Now I'm going to do a separate review, really going into the details between the Maysmore and the Pains. So I won't give away too much, but. I have to say, I'm really impressed with this hive. It's a nice design. You can tell that a beekeeper has looked at this design and it's been built for beekeepers. They've preempted a lot of the little quirks that would have come up, and I think the bees would do really, really well in here. One thing I will say though, if you're looking at redesigning this hive, please don't go looking at trying to take poly out. I do fully appreciate that the poly prices have gone through the roof, What a lot of the other manufacturers have done have tried to reduce down that wall thickness, and the further we go to the bottom, that race to the bottom, you're losing a lot of the benefits. I think this Payne's Polyhive has got so much material in it, and I think that justifies the additional price compared to, say, the Suyenti, where the material has gone down so much over the last few design iterations that you're not getting a huge amount of benefit over wood. Whereas this, the meat in it, the meat on the bone is really substantial and noticeable. So if you're doing a next version of this design, taking a couple of tweaks and modifying it, please do try and keep as much poly in it as possible because that really is one of the good benefits of the hive. So that's it for the review. I do hope you've enjoyed this and I hope these reviews are worthwhile for you. I've got the Beehive Supplies poly hive coming up in the next couple of weeks and then we've got the full range of poly hives within the United Kingdom. I'm going to look at a couple of other ones as well. We're going to do some Pauly Langstroth ones. We'll get more equipment in and we'll do these reviews to give you the upfront look of these products before you go ahead and buy them. So if you are interested in buying this product, go direct to Paynes. Really good company to work with. I'll stick their email address up there at the bottom of the screen. Take a look at what they've got. They do some really good sales at various times of the year, so you can snag a bargain on one of these hives. So the final thing to say is, would I recommend the Paynes Polyhive for someone getting into beekeeping who doesn't have any kit? And with only the minor caveats I've mentioned in this video, so the landing board with the reduction in size and footprint, the little rebates on the floor, and the fact that you've got that exterior footprint, I would definitely recommend this hive. It's got nice design, it's solid, it's got the nice runners. I think the bees are going to do really, really well in here. Just be aware the wooden nationals aren't going to sit perfectly on it, but they've put in place a design to track that water away. And also the components that come with it are built for standard wooden nationals, so 460 by 460 mil. You might just get— it might not be 100% pleasing on the eye, but in terms of function, I think it's a really good hive. So that's it for the video. Hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.