Queen Rearing Long Hive - Hyde Hives - Product Review - Episode 1

Today I'm going to show you the 8-in-1 queen rearing long hive. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Thanks again so much to the guys down at Hyde Hives. They have given me this long hive, and this isn't any old long hive. This is an 8-in-1 nucleus queen rearing long hive. So in this video, I'm going to review this product. I'll talk to you about all of the different features of the product, what it's made of, how it comes, how I'm going to use it, the functionality, absolutely everything. Top to bottom review of this 8-in-1 Nucleus queen rearing long hive. So I am really excited by this. You know me, I love to get a new beekeeping toy, and this is the latest one that I've got from the guys down at Hyde Hives. It is slightly longer than a normal long hive and it's used for queen rearing purposes, but it's got lots of flexibility built into it. So I'm going to jump straight into the review. We'll go from top to bottom, talk about all the features, and I'll let you know what I think of this product. So as per the normal long hive, it comes with a phenolic ply roof, so it's film-backed, should last for years and years and years without delaminating. Really nice design, and just look at it, like the whole thing does look fantastic. I love the look of long hives. I think they just look so much nicer than normal hives, and especially something like this, which is a queen rearing hive or somewhere to keep nucs. You don't really lose any functionality at all, and if anything, it's probably a little bit more practical, especially for overwintering. 8 nucs in one, doing your queen rearing, it's all in one place like that. Keeps it nicely off the floor. I can't wait to get this in use. The way that I'm going to use it next season, I'm going to fill it up with bees. I'm going to keep on taking the queens out, loading them in with queen cells. Got a few different strategies that I might put into play in terms of building up the colonies, but I'll cover the functionality of that all later on within this video. So here's the roof, phenolic ply, really nice long roof. Got that seam at the top They're perfectly watertight. I really do like the design of these roofs. It's, it's very nice indeed. 9mm ply, I think that is, but it's completely waterproof. Really nice, good-looking, solid roof. Then other things to notice on the exterior is you've got your bee escapes there. So if you do get any stray bees in the roof area, you've got a little cone bee escape there for the bees to get out, and they shouldn't get back in. And they are surprisingly effective. I'm amazed on my other long hive, which is which is just over there, how effective they are. You do you close the lid. There's loads of bees in the lid. You come back the next time and there's no bees in the lid. So they do work really well. And then the entrances. So the same as the long hive, you've got your entrances there with a standard entrance block. Same on the other side. And then what makes this one different is you've got your little mini nuc entrances. So you've got one, two. 3 on this side, and then 4, 5, and 6 to make up a total of 8 entrances. Now just to take a step back from it as well, it's a little bit longer than the normal long hive but not a huge amount. Comes with its own stand, and this version here I've got, this is made in top quality pine, so really nice, good quality pine. If I had to have a choice whether it was pine or cedar, would have probably gone with cedar, And if I'm recommending one to you, I would recommend to go with cedar. I do think it lasts a little bit longer than pine, but I'm not going to moan. Obviously, as a free product, I'm over the moon with this one. But this is 100% pine, and as you can see, it's a top quality pine, like hardly any knots in it at all, if any knots really on the actual hive, a couple on the stand. And the stand is included, really good looking stand. I do love the stands on these Hyde hives. They're designed so nicely, and the splayed legs just add a lot of appeal. So then other external features, you've got your pull-out varroa trays if you're doing any varroa monitoring, or you just want a solid board at the bottom over winter. You can keep those in all the time, or you can take them out all the time, entirely up to you. Really nice design though. They're made of phenolic ply as well. They should last for years and years. Right, so let's get into the hive then and have a look inside, because that is where All the fun happens in this hive. It's built so well inside, and as soon as I got it here, I started having a play around with it with Dean, and I, I thought at first it was going to be 8x3-frame nucs, but in fact it's actually 8x5-frame nucs. So this one's on a national format, so I've got enough space for 8 pretty much full-size nucs in here. Like, when they condense down over winter, 5 or 6 frames doesn't make a huge amount of difference. And for queen rearing, once you've built them up to that strength, doesn't make a massive amount of difference either. If anything, the extra couple of frames, once you've built them up, I find does help to get the queens laying a little bit quicker. Let's look inside the long hive though and see what the fuss is about on the inside. So as with all the long hives, you get these gas-powered struts and they just make life so easy. Really easy to lift up, nice slow closing mechanism so it doesn't slam down. It's going to prolong the life of the hive. It just makes it really easy to use as well. Then we move on to where the fun happens, and you get 8 separate crown boards. Each one of the crown boards is a nice clear Perspex crown board, and then it's got a central hole that you can use for varroa treatments. You can use it for feeding syrup, you can use it for feeding fondant. Really multi-purpose, good crown boards. Then as you start to take away those crown boards there, so you can see I've taken it away on this side over here, And I've taken it away on this side over here. You can see it's a really, really good seal, and that's what's important here, is you have a good seal around the edge. And that's important on a queen rearing nuc or a queen castle or whatever you want to call it. You don't want any chance that the bees can come from one side. Maybe you've got bees in this side over here. Over here, you want a really good top quality seal, and that's what this hive here gives you. It gives you a really good top quality seal. Quality seal. So when you take all the crown boards out like that, I thought, great, this is really good. You get lots of space. I'm going to be able to create amazing colonies in there, nice big 5-frame splits. And I hadn't realized what you could do, and this just makes it so much easier. Now these dividers here, they're completely removable, and I just think, wow, that makes everything so much easier. Because what I can do Is I can overwinter this as a single colony if I want and then build it up and then split it off into 8. I can overwinter it as kind of like 2 or 3 colonies, however I want to do it. I've got the flexibility to move things around. If one of them is getting too big and I've not got a queen to put into it, I can do some sort of merge, and we'll cover merging colonies in long hives in a future video. But I just thought that was really, really nice design, and I'm so glad that they haven't fixed those in permanently and they give you the flexibility to move things around. So these dividers here, they're made out of pine as well. Good quality pine there, not a single knot in sight. And then you've just got nice plywood in the middle, good quality 12mm plywood. I would treat that plywood edge there. I'll get a bit of beeswax and I'll get a bit of oil and I'll just make up a little mix just to seal that from any moisture ingress. But really nice quality dividers and a really nice quality fit as well. You can just see everything Fits together so nicely on these hives. Get that into focus for you there. You can see it goes right up to the edge, right up to the edge again. Everything is a very tight fit, really good workmanship. So there you go, there's a little bit of an overview in terms of what the queen rearing hive is all about. I'm going to put this one to use straight away. I'm going to get 8 colonies in here, probably go over about 2 or 3 frames, newly mated queens, And I'm going to let the colonies build up in here, try and get 8 nucs through the winter. Obviously I'm going to do future videos about that, so if you're interested to see how I build up the colonies in here, please hit the subscribe button. We will do lots of videos on this queen rearing hive. We'll do some this year about stocking it, how to get them through the winter, and then we'll do plenty of videos next year about how we're going to rear queens in this hive. Now this hive here is not cheap, it's about £550, but we have managed to negotiate with the guys down at Hyde Hives a discount code for anybody watching our videos. So I'll pop the discount code up into the comments section, it's NO-NONSENSE-BEEKEEPING with a couple of hyphens in there as well, and that will get you 10% off any hives across the whole of the Hyde Hives store. So once you take that discount into account, you're talking around £500, and again you might think, well, £500, that is a lot of money for a hive. But I think that's a relative bargain when you come to think about a couple of things. So the first one, okay, is subjective, but oh my God, how nice does it look? It's a pleasure to use, and put something like that in your apiary, in your garden, it's going to get a lot of attention, and it's just really, really nice. But the bigger one than that is that you've got 8 nucs here. So if you were to go to any other manufacturer and say, I want 8 Wooden nucs, regardless of whether it's pine or cedar, and the cedar hive actually costs only a little bit more than the pine hive here. Once you actually work this out for these ones here, you're not paying that much for it at all. You're paying around £60 per nuc for each one of the nucs in this colony here, there or thereabouts. And I know you could go and you could get poly nucs, and I do like poly nucs, I use poly nucs a lot, but to have something that looks as nice as this, For the price of say £60 per nuc, I really don't think that overall asking price for this is too far out at all. Actually, I think it's probably a bit of a bargain. What I do love about this queen rearing nuc though is the flexibility that it gives you with those removable dividers. That is going to make my life so, so easy when it comes to next year because let's say for instance I put 8 queens in here, 8 colonies, and we get 5 of them through the winter. And I think they will overwinter really, really well in here, but you do get losses. Say you get 5 losses. All I have to do then is kind of look where the losses are. I'll take out the divider in April, maybe put a feeder on, maybe build that colony out to fill the void, and then I can make splits directly in the unit here. So then all I need to do is go and put the divider back down in. Half of that split is therefore queenless. They'll raise queen cells. I can knock them down. Add a mated queen or add a queen cell and I'm good to go again. If the dividers weren't movable like that or you couldn't take them out, I'd have to start doing splits and the bees would get really, really disorientated quite quick and it means you have to make splits very early in the year to try and backfill the losses. So I love the fact that they've built in that flexibility into this design. I think it's going to be really, really good. What I am going to do on this though is I'm going to put some sort of markings around the entrance. Because I just think with queen castles like this and queen rearing hives, I have had issues in the past where you'll get reasonable mating success but you don't get 100% mating success because you're asking the queens to go out and fly and get mated and come back to one hive and they can get confused, go back into the wrong entrances and then they get killed. So I'm going to do my very best to try and avoid that happening and I'll probably do that by putting some form of stencil on each of the hive entrances Just a black and white stencil, something that they can see, a really obvious shape or pattern or something like that, just to help the queens get back to the correct entrance. I don't want to go into too much detail on this review here because the next video you're going to see of this hive, I'm going to go into lots of detail and actually have some bees. I'm going to be stocking it, adding queens. You'll see the hive in action, and I think that's just the best way to get to grips and understand what this hive is all about. So if you're considering getting one of these hives, I definitely recommend it. They are top quality hives. Got the discount code as well. That will take 10% off any hives on the Hyde Hives website. And even better than that, the guys have said that they're going to give me some different hives later on in the year. Maybe a lay-on hive, maybe a top bar hive, maybe do some observation hives as well. We're going to have plenty of these videos going forward because people do like watching them and they like to see different hives in action. So I hope you enjoyed that video. 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. Bye.