In this instructional video, the presenter explains why traditional plywood crown boards are inferior and demonstrates the benefits of replacing them with a poly Ashforth feeder. He outlines the drawbacks of standard crown boards—extra components, storage hassle, and higher disease risk—and introduces the poly Ashforth feeder (made by Lyson, sold by Abello in the UK) as a single-piece solution that provides bee‑space, feeding capability, and superior insulation. The speaker details how to feed sugar syrup and fondant using the feeder’s 10‑litre reservoir and solid bottom, explains the insulation properties of the 160 g/L polystyrene construction, and shows how the feeder remains on the hive year‑round, only being lifted when supers are added. He highlights winter advantages: reduced condensation on the bee cluster, constant access to feed, and a highly insulated top. The video concludes with a recommendation to ditch the crown board, a note on the preferred UK supplier (Abello over Suyenti), and a plug for his “14‑Day Beekeeper” online course.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you why you should be upgrading your crown board for a poly Ashworth feeder. So if you buy a ready-made beehive, a set with supers in, you're likely to get a crown board that looks like this, generally made of ply with a pine rim to give you the bee space. But I have to say, I really don't like crown boards like this. Now the idea behind a crown board is that it goes on the top of the beehive at all times. So if you've got a single brood box like that, it lives there, and then as you put your supers on, it just goes up and gives you something to stop the bees getting up from the beehive up into the You can also use a crown board for feeding, so you could place an upturned super in it like that, and then if you look down here you can see you've got plenty of space to get a feeder on top of your bees. So this space is good here, you can place a feeder on, you can even place an upturned fondant tub there as well. Plenty of different ways for you to be able to use the board to feed your bees. However, there's lots of things that I don't like about the crown board and I don't use these in any of my beehives anymore. The thing that I don't like about crown boards is that in order to get it to do anything, you have to add something else in. So if I want to use it to feed, I have to add a super or an eke there, and then I've got to go away and store that super or the eke anyway. When I add together the combination of the crown board and the feeder and the eke, that's way more storage for me. And then the sum of all of those parts don't get anywhere near to what you can upgrade your crown board for, which is a poly Ashforth feeder that does all of those jobs that I just mentioned in one piece of kit that never ever leaves the hive, which means that your disease risk is massively Reduced. So this is what the polyashforth feeder looks like, and these are made by Lyson. In the UK, you can buy them from Abello, and I think they're possibly going to be available in the USA in a Langstroth format coming soon. So this is what the polyashforth feeder looks like. It's manufactured by Lyson, and I bought this one here from Abello, and it is the only polyashforth national feeder in the UK that has the correct bee space underneath. There is another one that's made by Suyenti that has a flush bottom that isn't compatible with the bee space of a National hive. So if you're looking for a recommendation, definitely get the Abello one. It's more expensive, but it does the job a million times better. You can see injection molded plastic all the way around the edge, giving you that bee space. So when I place it on top of the hive like that, the bottom bee space design of the National gives the space for the bees to move on top of the frames. I know that can be a little bit confusing, but to simplify it, the Abello one works and the Suyenti one definitely doesn't work. So let me tell you about some of the features of this feeder, because we're upgrading a crown board with a feeder, but it's a feeder that has tons of additional benefits over the crown board. So obviously we need the feeder in order to feed. And if you want to feed with the polyashforth feeder, all you do is you place it on like that. You come here to the 10-litre reservoir, you pour in as much sugar syrup as you want. And then the way that the bees come up is they come up a slot here, they go over and then down another slot, and then they can access that reservoir of syrup. So normally I keep this slot here closed, which means that none of the bees can get through this metal into the feeder, which means that none of them are going to die. But then the last feed of the season, I chuck a load of straw in here, I open up the slot like that, I let the bees in, and they just go around and clear everything up and leave behind just bone-dry straw, which reduces any mould issues going over winter. So that's how you feed syrup in a polyash forth feeder, but with the crown board you can feed fondant as well. And the polyashforth feeder has a really nice trick to be able to feed fondant. So with the crown board, this is how you would feed it. You place the crown board on like that and you put a big bit of fondant on the top, and then you'd have to have a super or an eke around the side. But you can see the polyashforth feeder just has a big solid poly bottom. There's no hole. So instead of placing it on that way, you just turn it upside down and you just place the fondant directly on the frames. Now some people will tell you this is a heat sink and the colony will struggle to keep it warm, and this is where the polyashforth feeder comes into its own. It is made with 160 grams per litre density polystyrene, which isn't the most insulative on the market, but it is by far and away the most durable and tough poly that I have found on the market, and it's still incredibly insulative. Way, way more insulative than a thin-ply crown board like this and a wooden super. So it has many features. You can feed fondant in it, you can feed syrup in it, and it is naturally very, very insulative for the bees, which is much better than the thin-ply crown board. But the thing that I love most about it is that the crown board lives on the beehive all the way throughout the year. Its main function really is to stop the bees in the beehive reaching the roof. So all of those other ancillary bits that I spoke about, like the feeders and the supers, I've got to store them somewhere else throughout the entire year, and I'll be taking them off and putting them back on, and then they'll need cleaning because they're going from hive to hive. Whereas if we just remove the crown board altogether and never have it again and place the polyash forth feeder here like this, Then I never ever have to take it off. And people might say, well, what happens when you go to add your supers on? Super simple. All you do is you place your supers on and you lift your polyashworth feeder up as a crown board like this. There'll be no feed in it by then. It's just a big empty insulative crown board that gives you a huge amount of benefit in the summer, but really comes into its own in the winter. So as you can imagine, throughout the season we're adding our supers on. We've got our brood box and 3 supers there. And the polyashworth feeder just lives on the top like that all the way throughout the season. Actually does a surprising amount of good in the summer. But it's when we condense everything back down for winter that you see the massive upgrade over the thin-ply crown board. Normally people would set their bees up like this: they put the crown board on, they put a metal or wooden roof on, and just leave the bees to it. Now that setup with a poly brood box is really bad for your bees because it would direct the condensation to where you don't want it, which is directly over the cluster. When you overwinter with a big Thick polyisoprene feeder like that. Not only do your bees have instant access to both syrup and fondant whenever they need it all the way throughout the winter, literally like that, but you're also putting the thickest and most insulative poly at the top as opposed to the sidewalls here. What that means is when the condensation is forming on the beehive, it's not forming up here and dropping on the cluster and really getting in the way of your bees and working against them. It's gonna form here on the walls, on the vertical surfaces, and track out the open mesh floor. This here is the perfect setup for winter, a highly insulated box that can cope with any conditions throughout the UK. So my recommendation to you is to ditch the crown board. We've got tons of tips like that in our online course, 14-Day Beekeeper, that will convert you from a beginner to a competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks.
