In this video the presenter introduces the Keepers Hive, the first beehive of its kind available in the UK that allows full brood inspections without ever lifting the supers. After meeting the hive’s creators at the North American Honeybee Expo, the presenter unboxes, assembles, and stocks the hive with a queenless colony and a new queen. He explains each component – Perspex crown board, queen excluder, specially‑caught supers, heavy‑duty straps, and Langstroth deep frames used as supers – and shows how they interlock to create a stable, weather‑sealed box. The video quantifies the ergonomic advantage, estimating roughly 2,000 super lifts avoided per apiary each year, and demonstrates the simple inspection process that only requires removing the roof and crown board. The presenter also details the colony transfer, queen introduction, and the hive’s stability features for windy UK conditions. He concludes with enthusiasm, stating he will run the hive for the season and monitor its performance.
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When you're doing your weekly inspections in the brood box, you have to take off every single super that is on that hive to inspect the brood area. What if I told you there was a beehive that did away with all of that and you could inspect the brood box, every single frame, without lifting a single super? This is a first for the UK. This is the Keepers Hive, and this is probably going to be my favorite video of 2024. So when I was at the North American Honeybee Expo, I got talking to the owners of the Keepers Hive. And they have developed the coolest beehive I think I have ever seen in my life. It genuinely does away with any need to lift supers at any point throughout the season, apart from when you come to extract them at the end. Gives you the ability to go into your beehive, inspect the brood area without lifting the supers off. How on earth does this work? In this video, I'm not only going to show you how it works, I'm going to stock my keeper's hive that's been sent over from America, and I'm going to take you from the very top all the way down to the bottom and show you why this is Such a unique proposition, especially within the UK. So this colony here, full to the brim with bees, we're going to move it off to one side. I'm going to get the keeper's hive, put it in place, get all of the bees transferred over, and then I'll show you how it works. Now if you're wondering what I was doing there, that colony had already had a split taken out of it and they were on day 8, so they were hopelessly queenless. Shaking the bees off, taking down the emergency cells, and I have one ready-to-go F1 Black Mountain Honey queen that's going to go in there. So we have down in the brood area a colony full of bees, they don't have a queen, they have plenty of brood, and then all I'm going to do is just build this back up again. So I'm getting my frames, getting them nicely aligned in this brood area here. I love this hive so much, and if you've not seen this before, you're just going to be thinking, what is going on here? This is something very, very different indeed. So once you've got your brood frames down there in the brood area, you get these 2 handles like that, and they just slot over the sides. And then you take a queen excluder and you place the queen excluder over half like that. And at the moment you're thinking, what is going on here? This is just bonkers. This is like no beehive that anybody has ever seen before. The final piece of the jigsaw goes that way around, and it's a clear Perspex crown board. When I saw this for the first time, I was absolutely amazed. I loved it. So the next step is you take your super and you place it down there. Now these supers have very cool and very important catches on them. So on the first super, there's 4 catches all the way around the side like this. You have 2 on the front and And then you have 2 on the side, and it's the 2 on the side that are very, very important, 'cause it gives the box the stability that it needs in order for you to be able to take out the frames and for everything not to fall apart, even though that bit there has just fallen out. So, start it again. You put these 2 bits in here like that, and then you put the Perspex crown board over the top. So this is the setup of the hive. You've got your super at the top there, And you've got your Perspex crown board down there with the handles that come in either side. See, you've got your handles at the front and you can see the latches that I'm talking about here. Latches on all the way around like that. Now, the clever thing about this hive here is that you have this roof and the roof closes up like that and it seals the bees in. What I'm just gonna quickly do is just move this hive out of the way, 'cause this hive is stealing all of the bees that I want to go into the keeper's hive there. So let's get this hive out of the way. And that way all the bees now only have one option than to go into the keeper's hive. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go back to the nucleus box and I'm going to shake all of the bees outside the front to make sure that they go into their new home. And you will see what we have now is absolute carnage in the air. Here's the clever bit though, you keep on placing these boxes on here. Now I've retrofitted these, so I've got these straps on because this ends up being quite tall. And if you put these additional little buckles on here, it means that it's not all gonna fall apart or gonna blow over in the UK wind. And then all you're gonna do is you're just gonna fill up all of these boxes with your Langstroth frame. So this is a Langstroth format beehive. Now you don't need to go crazy with the height here, but I've got a lot of bees and it's very warm at the moment. So I'm just gonna continue adding these frames in and filling up all of the boxes that I've got. Continuing to add these frames in, just double checking to make sure there's no emergency cells in here still. No cells in that one, bit of brood. Then I'm just shaking off all the bees in front of the hive. They know the way in because they've been orientated to that exact site, and you've got a nice tall landmark there for them. So the keeper's hive is now complete. All of those boxes you can see there above the queen excluder, they are Langstroth deep frames, and they are acting as supers because they are above the queen excluder. The only one that's slightly different, I've got a Langstroth shallow in there, which is the original box that comes with the Keepers Hive. I've got the heavy-duty straps on all 3 sides there, so 1 at the front, 2 on the side, 1 on the back, and that there is to ensure that when I'm going into the brood frames to do inspections, everything is nice and stable. I've got the handhelds at the front there that I can remove, and then I've got my roof that's got a nice piece of sealant plastic to make sure that no rainwater can get down into that gap there. I'm gonna run this hive this year. I am super, super excited about it. Okay, maybe a bit of a baptism by fire, but I wanted to get all of those bees to go into the keeper's hive. But how does it work? You look at this, and this is the reason that I put all these boxes on here today. Obviously, you don't need to put all the boxes on, and you can have your crown board wherever you want the bees to stop, but this was a pretty big colony. So let's assume you've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 supers on, and you wanna come in here and you wanna do an inspection of your brood area to make sure that there's no swarm cells. What do you have to do? You have to start at the top, you take the roof off, take the supers off, every single super, stack them off to one side, do your brood inspection, stack them all back up again. Like, that's 10 lifts for one colony. If you do that across an apiary of, say, 10, that's 100 lifts, 100 super lifts per weekly inspection. And say you're going to do 20 inspections per year, something like that. If the maths is right, that is 2,000 lifts. 2,000 super lifts that you need to do each year. And let me get this straight, I'm not paid to say this, I'm not doing a review, I'm just telling it like it is. These are facts. 2,000 super lifts in a single apiary per year. The design of this beehive does away with all of that. I do not need to touch these boxes again now until the end of the year, with one exception, if the bees start to swarm. And that's where the Keepers Hive has a real nifty little party trick in terms of the management as well. But let's get in, let's do a brood inspection without lifting these boxes because it is super, super simple. So it's as simple as this. You come in, you open up the roof like this, you take away these 2 little guards, pop them off to one side, clear crown board like that, and you come inside. Let me just get my queen out so I don't drop my queen. A little sting to the finger there. My queen there. There you go, look, simple as that. Access down into the brood box. So if you just keep a Langstroth standard deep box, you can take these frames out, pop them up into a box, and then you slide the frames over like this, giving you access to inspect every single frame down there in the brood box without taking the supers off. I'm going to let these bees get sorted because this is quite disruptive moving them into a colony like this. We'll let them get settled, we'll come back, and we will follow this hive throughout the year. The Keepers Hive, first one in the UK. Thank you so much for sending it to me. I'm gonna have the best fun with it this year.
