In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey demonstrates a step‑by‑step process for repairing a broken poly brood box. He begins by explaining why poly hives can fracture more easily than wood and reassures viewers that the damage is fixable. Edwards recommends using a strong adhesive—preferably polyurethane‑based Gorilla Glue or a two‑part epoxy—and outlines his mixing ratio (equal parts resin and hardener) and timing (5‑minute epoxy for quick work). He shows how to apply a thin, even layer of glue to the mating faces, scrape excess, and then reinforce the joint with two screws per end to provide lateral support and clamp the bond while it cures. After the glue sets (about five minutes), he removes any remaining excess, and optionally discusses using exterior‑grade wood filler to hide screw holes or smooth the joint for aesthetic purposes. The video emphasizes practical tips such as aligning the box correctly, ensuring screws sit flush, and the overall quick turnaround, concluding that the repaired box will be solid and ready for the next season.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how to repair and glue a broken poly brood box. So I was walking along with this brood box yesterday. I had about 6 of them stacked up with frames. I was just moving them from one side of the apiary to the other just to free up some space. And I dropped it and it broke. So one of the issues with poly is that it does break. Like, if you dropped a wooden hive or a wooden box, the chances are it's probably not going to break, definitely not going to break as severely as the poly can break. But as bad as that looks, it's actually not the end of the world. Poly is very, very easy to kind of put back together, glue it, screw it. You can put it back together probably stronger than some of the dovetail boxes when they just kind of click together. So the aim of this video today is I'm going to show you how to repair damaged poly brood boxes or any poly boxes that you may have damaged using a glue and a screw method. So the glue that I normally use is a Gorilla Glue. So this is a polyurethane glue that actually bonds with the poly and creates a really, really super strong bond. I'm actually all out of polyurethane glue and any Gorilla Glue today, so I'm doing it with a 2-part epoxy. Now, 2-part epoxy is massive overkill for this job, but it works really, really well. You don't need 2-part epoxy to do this. Any kind of polyurethane glue or Gorilla Glue, which is just the brand name for one of them, is absolutely fine. I understand that you can actually use a weather-resistant PVA as well. I'm not entirely sold on that idea. I've never tried it myself, so it could be perfectly fine. I'm only going from my own experience, and I know for a fact, 100%, polyurethane and Gorilla Glue and epoxy resin work really, really well doing this. So stick to those and you'll be fine. Um, now what you could do here is you could just glue these back together, hold them in place for as long as you can, and leave them. And then that will give you a very, very strong bond. What I like to do though is I like to stick a couple of screws in either end as well, and then all that's doing is it's providing a bit of kind of lateral support and stopping that shear force being able to break the box again. Um, and for the sake of 4 screws, why not? It also gives you the benefit that it holds the joint close together while the glue is going off. So it's going to be a very, very quick video today. That is a very neat, clean break. They don't always break like that, I promise you. I didn't break it on purpose to do this video. Um, that was a genuine fall yesterday. So yeah, like I say, we'll just run through, show you how we glue it, how you prepare the glue, How much glue you need to put on, where you screw it, and then how long it takes to kind of cure. So I'm using a 2-part, 5-minute epoxy here. So I'm just going to mix these 2 pieces up together. I use equal quantities of the kind of actual epoxy resin and then the hardener and then mix it up. This is a very, very quick job, so I'm quite happy using a 5-minute one. I've also got a 15-minute and a 30-minute, but the polyurethane gives you about 30 minutes normally with the Gorilla Glue to kind of get a good fit, which is more than enough for this job. So I'm just mixing up the 2-part epoxy there. I'm going to give it a nice good mix. I'm just using kind of an old fork that I'll clean up at the end. So now that's mixed, I've got 5 minutes to do it, so I better be quick. Right, so what you want to do is you want to get your faces open like that so the faces are facing upwards, so then you can spread a good amount of epoxy on there. Um, you know, these are the 2 faces that I'm treating. I don't even need to worry about that box. You only need to treat one of the joining faces, and then all I do is I just kind of smear some of that on. And what you're trying to do is trying to get that across the whole face. It only needs a very, very thin layer. So epoxy resin and polyurethane is actually gap-filling glue. So although you've kind of got like a mottled effect on this glue here— and sorry, a mottled effect on the surface It will fill all of that gap up for you. So all you need to do is just make sure that you're getting it roughly along, and then you want to kind of scrape off the excess as well. You really don't need any excess. It doesn't matter if you leave it on, but it's just a bit of a waste because you only need a real thin, even coating all the way across it. So just continue to apply it all the way along. Making sure that you're kind of getting into the nooks and crannies as they come apart. There you go. So that's fully applied now. And then what you want to do is you want to place the rest of the poly back on like that, making sure that it's in correct— the correct way, the correct way round, and you're getting a nice good force. All the mating faces are correct and fully aligned. And then you want to get your impact driver or screwdriver and check that you're going to go in, and you want to kind of go in completely down the center of any of the surfaces that you're going in. You don't want the screw protruding out anywhere. And then you just screw in. You don't need to go down any further than the surface. I mean, that's going to create a really tight bond as it is. I'll do one on either side because that's probably twisted it a little bit now. And you can tell if you're doing a good job, yeah, because as you put that screw in, you should see a tiny little seam of glue protrude out of the crack, and then you know you've done a good job. You know you've got a good seal, and you know that it's kind of clamping it tight. So then what I like to do at that point is just scrape off any excess. You don't need any excess on there. All it's going to do is drip on your work surfaces, and then you might get told off by your partner. So we clean up at the end, and then we're going to flip that over to do the other side. Same again, one screw in the top and one screw in the bottom. We take off the excess. And that's it, we're done. Like, it's very, very quick. I mean, that's going to be solid in about 5 minutes now. So we'll give it 5 minutes, I'll let it set, and I'll pop back and you can have a look at it once it's finished. Another thing to mention on this is that if you've got awkward cracks, um, and the polyurethane glue hasn't expanded to fill that gap sufficiently, or you want it to look nice I'm never that fussed about the boxes looking that nice as long as they're practical. You can use an exterior-grade wood filler. So if you wanted to kind of cut— if you wanted to hide those screw holes, you could countersink it down a couple of mil and then use a spatula and use some exterior-grade wood filler to go over it and then paint over the top, and then you've got a completely invisible seal. And then the same with the joints, do you know what I mean? At the moment you could see where the joints are, the glue's kind of coming out of them. If you wanted to kind of grind that back down and fill it back up with polyfiller, you'd use an exterior-grade wood filler, and then that would give you a really, really smooth finish. But I don't think you need to do that. Like, this is a very, very strong and effective job. If you're kind of into beekeeping for the aesthetics and the look of it, you're probably not going to be using poly anyway. You're probably using really nice first-grade cedar boxes. So it's just a kind of a little note to mention that if you do need to fill any gaps that the glue doesn't fill, An exterior-grade wood filler is exactly the job that you want for that. Just wanted to give you a bit of a close-up here so you can see. Here are the screws where they've gone in, 2 screws on either end. This is the seam that I've now joined together. You'll see kind of remnants of the glue coming out here now, and obviously it's the same on the other side. Again, you can see the screw here and the screw here, and then the seam along, and And you can see kind of a bit clearer on this one where I've smeared the glue and tried to scrape off the excess. I mean, that will all set now and that'll be absolutely 100% solid, so there's kind of no need to, uh, to repair that any further. That'll be fit for purpose and ready for the upcoming season. So that's it for today, just a very short video showing you how you can repair polyhives or any poly boxes using a glue and screw method. I do hope you've enjoyed the video, plenty more of these to come. Please hit the subscribe button, and I'll see you next time.
