Red Plastic Frame Review and Assembly

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today we're going to review red plastic beehive frames. Before we do our review though, please check out honeybeeBay.co.uk, an online beekeeping marketplace for all things beekeeping. You can buy nucs, you can buy bee equipment, you can buy honey, you can sell nucs, sell bee equipment, sell honey. It's a really good collaborative website. Take a look and see what you think. Right, so today I'm going to review these red plastic frames, and what I'm going to do is I'm just going to show you how they work, how to assemble them, how to put foundation in them, and then I'm going to run a brood box on them this year and give you my thoughts. So you might think Black Mountain Honey is not about plastic. We don't like plastics, and we do our best to reduce the amount of plastic waste going into the environment. Why are you reviewing plastic frames? Now, we've spoken about this before, the difference between single-use plastics and plastics that are going to last a long time. All of the material in this is made from recycled plastic, and this material can be recycled at the end of its life. I've spoken to a couple of bee farmers who have moved fully over to these now, and they moved over to the ones with the plastic foundation as well, and they swear by them. And they said, you need to have a look at these, just do a review, keep them in one brood box for a year and see what you think. It will save you so much time assembling frames and cutting combs out at the end of the year. Just take a look and see what you think. So I bought these, these are from Beehive Bits, but I bought them through Payne's along with my poly hive that I've just finished doing my review of, and I'm just going to see what I think of them. I'm personally not keen on the idea of plastic, but I really do like the idea of maybe just using them for my heather honey. So I can just put a nice piece of wire-free foundation in them, crack them open, cut out the comb each year, sell it as heather cutcomb honey, press out the stuff that I make a little bit of a mess of, and then just put new foundation in each year and move on from there. And if they're good at that and they're easy to clean and I get a good life expectancy out of them, then I do think they're a valid product. And it's similar to the polyhives Okay, they're plastic and we don't like adding plastic into the environment, but if you get the long life out of them and they're recycled at the end of their use and it saves you a lot of time, then it really isn't the end of the world. So in this video, I'm just going to show you what they're about, how to open them, show you a few pictures, and show you how easy they are to use. So these are formed from 2 separate halves. You can pull the halves together and they're molded from plastic, and it's recycled plastic. They just clip together, so you've got 2 faces that just clip together, and then you've got Hoffman-style self-spacing frames. These are effectively a DN4 frame. It's the exact equivalent, exact same dimensions, and they're self-spacing. So they're DN4, you don't need castellations, you don't need anything else in the box. These will work up against each other, and you can use them interchangeably with DN4 frames. Now to get them apart, you would normally use your hive tool. I'm using a plastic window scraper today because I left my hive tool at another apiary. Classic. So I'm going to— it might take a little bit longer to get them apart, but I had a play around with these at home and it really wasn't that much longer to take them apart. What's the beauty of these is that it speeds up the frame building process. They come like this, they come ready built. All you need to do is open them up, pop some foundation in, close them back up again, and they're Done. So I'm just going to run through that now, see how quickly I can do it. That's it. Quick, really quick, surprisingly quick to be honest. I've just done that with some wired foundation there because I've not got any wire-free foundation available at the moment. Just doing that as a bit of a demo, but it was as quick as that. Like, I didn't speed that up, and to be honest, I got it caught a little bit on the corner. That was really quick. So I'm just going to do it again, and I'll probably time myself just to work out, because making up a frame, putting the foundation in, is probably a minute, minute and a half's job. I know people like Chris Manton can do it in 30 seconds, but I don't think he can do every single one at 30 seconds. So even if you took kind of 45, 50 seconds as an estimate, if you're doing thousands of these a year, this could be a huge, huge time saver. This is the reason that I'm interested in these. So we take another one. It's fully closed. I'm not cheating. Let's open it up. They come together so quickly. They really do come apart so quickly. Just pop your foundation in and clip them back together. It is as simple as that. It, it's so quick and so simple. It's a really nice design. So I reckon that's probably taken me about 15 seconds. I'm just going to do the last one there just to see how quick it is, and I won't talk, I'll just get it done. Start to finish, and we'll do an exact time of how long it takes. Done. So I'll put the time up there, and I'll give you an accurate assessment. I reckon that's probably close to ten seconds. So Chris Manton with your thirty-second frames. I have saved you 2/3 of your time now using the plastic one. So I do joke, it's, it is a very different process. These are obviously a lot easier and it is a different product, but it just goes to show that's how quick you can do that. So for me, if we say an average is a minute to put together a frame and put the foundation in it, and that's probably the quickest that I really do it in, I've taken that down to 10 seconds. So I've cut 50 seconds per frame off. And if you extrapolate that over 3,000 or 4,000 frames, which is quite easy to do in a season if you're expanding, that's going to save me so much time. Now, the bigger time saver on this though, if that's not enough saving me 50 seconds per frame, is when I come to the end of the usable life of this product, as in the foundation, when I need to melt that down, I can do it in a much better way. All I do instead of melting it down Is I just get back in, unclip the frames, and completely take them apart like that. And then I'm going to be left with lots of honeycomb on there, and I can just scrape out that honeycomb. And then I should be able to just clean these. And I'll have to double-check and see how you clean them. I'm not sure how well they're going to react to steam cleaning, so I'll have to do that in a separate video. Once I get them dirty, I'll give them a good steam clean. If they start warping and deforming, then it is a bit of an issue. But even with that, I can just scrape them down and then maybe put them in a big container with some bleach just to kill off any nasties, and then they're good to go again. And that is a huge, huge time saving, because with wooden frames, you need to go and put them into like a Melleflo or a gas steam wax melter, get all of the gunk off, rewire them if they need it, tighten up the wiring, Take off the bottom bars, put the foundation back in, connect it all back up again. I reckon it takes between 2 and 3 minutes per frame to do that, not even taking into account the part where you have to melt all the wax out. And if you can do that in, say, 30 seconds on here, so you're talking again, it's taking 1/6 of the time. It's a massive time saving. So you can see why I'm interested in these, and I really would like to get to the point where these work. I'm not keen on the fact that they're plastic, but I just need to do the research into it. So if these can last for 20 or 30 years and I can keep on reusing them, keep on extracting all of the gunk and the horrible wax, cleaning them, reusing them again, and I get 30 years out of them, the time savings obviously massive. The environmental issues get weaker and weaker for every single year these are in service, and at the end of their life they can go in with the hard recycling down at the tip And they'll just get made into something else. So I have to say, these look really promising. I watched— I'm not sure who it was— I watched a video of someone taking these apart and putting them together, and I kind of thought it took quite a while for the guy to do it, and I thought unless I'm getting the time savings with putting them together and taking them apart again, I probably don't want to be adding all of this plastic into my beekeeping operation. But having actually got my hands on them, had a play with them, And seeing how quick it is to take them apart, put them back together again, I've really got high hopes for these. So I'll do a separate video showing how the bees draw them out. Obviously, these bits of strip along here hold the wax foundation in place. The bees will draw it out as normal, and whether they miss out these strips, I'm not sure. They'll probably embed them in, just go around them. They might do something a little bit funky along these bits here, but I can live with that. You're only losing a few cells. You get the same when you've got the wire strips going through the foundation anyway. So we'll see what the bees do with them, and I'll hold that back for a different video. But my initial reaction is these look really good. I like the design, I like the simplicity of them. What I definitely, definitely don't like about these is the cost. They are so expensive. These are about £3 each. So the reason that they're so expensive is because I don't think many people are using them. I think if you started getting people buying these, and lots and lots of people bought them, and the manufacturers could order 200,000 at a time, I think the cost of these would come right down. So I've seen these cheaper in other places as well. I think £3 is probably the recommended retail price, the upper limit. I just bought 10 just to see what they're about, but for a single brood box it's costing me £30. Obviously I get all of the time savings, so you do need to take that into account. But if you're buying 1,000 of these or 10,000 of these, obviously you're going to get a bit of a discount, but it could be really, really expensive. So hopefully they do well for me. Hopefully it's something that I can integrate into at least my brood boxes and definitely onto the heather going into next season. And then I'll do an updated video to show you how they get on. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. I hope you found it useful. We try and review any different product that comes onto the market. Anything that we can adapt and adopt into our beekeeping operation to give us time savings or to give us increased effectiveness within our operations, we'll always take a look at it. We'll give you our honest review. We bought these ourselves, we bought them with our own money from Pains Bees website. All of the feedback and recommendations are my own. I'll give you my honest opinion and I'll see how I get on with them for the rest of the year. So thanks for watching the 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.