🐝 The Perfect Beehive - Mixing Poly and Wood for Strength, Insulation and Durability
Laurence Edwards shows how to build a high-performance beehive for around £150 by mixing wooden and poly parts instead of buying expensive starter kits. A poly feeder provides superior insulation and condensation that gives bees winter water, and his hybrid design produces warmer, healthier colonies even in mid-winter.
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One of the questions I get asked all the time is, if you were starting again, what beehive would you buy? In this video, I'm not going to show you what beehive I would buy, but I'm going to show you how to put together the pieces to make, in my opinion, the perfect beehive, but it's also as cheap as it can possibly be. So I think I have an unusually high experience when it comes to different types of beehives. I've had BS Honeybees, I've had Maysmore, I've had Pains, I've had Thorns, I've had Bee Equipment, I've had Suyenti, I've had Anal. I think that is how you say it as well. So anyway, I've got quite a lot of experience in terms of different beehives, how they work together, interoperability, and I've got my own personal opinion of which ones I think are the best. Now if you'd have asked me this question 5 years ago, I would have easily said I always going to go for a poly hive. You look around my apiaries, I have a lot of poly hives, but I do have a lot of issues with some of the poly hives that I have. And when you scroll back through those videos and I did the poly versus wood comparison, there were 2 main reasons why I much preferred a poly hive. Superior insulation. Far cheaper. We're talking about 50% of the price of an equivalent wooden hive. Now things have completely flipped over since then, and now poly hives are either the same price as wooden hives, or if you're going to do a bit of hunting in the sales, you can probably put together a wooden hive for a little bit cheaper. And that leads me into today's video, which is how are you going to build a hive that gives you all of that superior insulation benefits, gives you something that's durable, most importantly for me though, gives you something that's fit for purpose and that the bees like and is also cheap. So let's jump straight into it then. I'm going to give you my top tips for building a beehive system that's good for the bees and good for my wallet. So first thing I would say is buying beehive kits is never the cheapest way to go. Starter kits are good and they're nice and neat and they come with everything, but they're always going to be like a little bit more expensive and it means you can't chop and change between the different elements. What I've done with this beehive here is I'm doing a mixture of wood, a mixture of poly, and then also a Random ingredient thrown in that nobody would have ever thought of, but I think it works very, very well in this setup. So we'll start off at the bottom then. Wooden floors, underfloor entrances, I'm making them myself. I've done videos, I'll stick them into the description. I love my wooden underfloor entrances for a number of reasons. One, they're cheap, probably cost me about £5 each to make. Two, they're really good at defending against wasps if the colony is strong. And three, they're really easy to bung up and get them onto the back of a truck. You don't have to do any faffing around. There's no sliders, there's nothing that can break. And finally, number 4, the external footprint of them is exactly the same as the external footprint of a national hive, so it's not taking up unnecessary room. And it doesn't have an external landing board, but it has an internal landing board. So for all you landing board lovers out there, this one really does have everything. The underfloor entrance straight on my list, and it's costing about £5 to make. So next up, you'll see on this hive here I've got 2 different types of poly National Brood Box. And my setup here, I'm doing away with shallows, and this is not going to be for everyone. So if you can't lift up a fully loaded National box or a fully loaded deep Langstroth box, then this system isn't for you, and you might want to convert it to all shallows or a mixture of the two. But for me, you get a lot more bang for your buck if you're using one single box across the whole system. So I'm not doing deeps and shallows, I'm doing everything on a standard National deep. Not a 14 by 12, just a deep. Now, if money was no object, what I would throw in here is a standard Abello poly brood box. Not the 12-frame variant because it gives you a little bit of limitation. My personal poly hive is the 12-frame one, but what we're looking at today is this kind of intermediate mix and match, trying to keep it cheap. So if money was no object, I would go with a standard poly brood box from Abello, which is Lyson if you're in the US. Really good. But they are quite expensive. So for the purpose of this video, I'm not going to recommend that. I'm going to go with a wooden National Cedar Seconds, get it in the sale and get it flat-packed. Prices of these have gone up quite significantly, but you can still probably get one of those brood boxes for around £20, and then all you need to do is put it together yourself. So that's going to take me all the way up to the top of the hive, and I'm just going to go in there with a standard molded plastic queen excluder. Not going for the fancy frames. I really like my framed queen excluders, but they're far more expensive, and I don't see a huge amount of benefit compared to the plastic ones. So for this one, I'm going with the standard £3 or £4 molded plastic queen excluder. My frames and foundation, all I would say is get them in the sales, buy them in packs of 50, going for a DN4 variant, and then go for a good quality worker brood foundation. Keep all your scraps throughout the year, melt them down, and exchange it in. You'll be amazed at how much wax you get at the end of the year. Now, my recommendation for you when you're starting off is to go for 4 brood boxes for each individual colony. The standard measure I think most bee farmers go with is a single brood box and then 4 supers. So that's a total of 5 boxes. But in terms of the area that you're getting as an increase using deep boxes instead of shallows, you can probably get away with 4 boxes in terms of a single hive. So you've got a completely wooden hive up until this point. The thing I'm going to add on top next, and I've spoken about this on a live stream, I'm going to invest my money in a poly Ashforth feeder. Now there's not many companies that do poly Ashforth feeders. I've got pretty much every single one of them here. Paynes do one, I think. Maisemore do a Miller feeder, so slightly different. Swienty do a poly Ashforth feeder that's not built for the national bottom bee space hive, so you need to mess around with rims. And then you get the poly Ashforth feeder from Abello. which really is the best of the bunch. Super durable, really good capacity, correct bee space, and works very, very well on this setup. So up until this point, let's work through the calculations. We've got £5 for the floor, call it £5 for the queen excluder, that's a tenner. 4 boxes at say £20 each takes me up to around £90. I'm adding my frames in there, adding the foundation in there as well. I'll leave the frames and foundation out of the calculation because you don't often get those included in the kits anyway. So we're up to £90 at the moment. Polyash forth feeder is expensive, so it's roughly about £45-50. Let's call it £50 for the sake of this argument. We're up to £140 for this setup at the moment. The final thing we need to add is a roof, and with these colonies behind me here, I've got all of my roofs with Suyenti roofs. And the Suyenti roofs are fine. I've got nothing bad to say about the Suyenti roofs. They're good, they're thick, they overlap. The only one thing I wouldn't really like about them is the fact that they kind of extend out over the external footprint. But what I really do like about them is that they do double up as floors as well, so you can use them as solid floors. That's quite a good practical investment. But if I was buying these again, what I would do is I would look for a plastic molded horticultural tray that will just sit on the top of that polyashphalt feeder. You'll see it on this hive here, and I'll show you in a sec. When you have your polyashphalt feeders on top, you've got a completely sealed watertight system that's not going to let any water in. So all you need in your roof is the ability to stop water getting into the polyashphalte feeder. Doesn't need to be wood, doesn't need to be metal, doesn't need to be poly. Can be as cheap as you like. You could probably make something yourself, but a horticultural plastic tray in the right size probably costs you about £7 or £8 and gives you all of the protection that you need. Means that you can strap it all up together, means that it's watertight, means that it's really light, and it helps keep the cost down massively. So let's call it a tenner for that as well. My system there, I built a system and it's around £150. I think that system I built there though is far, far superior to any of like the starter kits that you'll find on the market. You might find like a pine National Beehive with no frames with 2 supers for around £100, £110. This one here, you've effectively got an additional 3 supers worth of space. It is only 2 brood boxes worth of space. But you've also got the huge benefit in a superior floor, way better floor that you've made yourself. And the big one for me is you've got your poly Ashworth feeder. It's a crown board, it's a feeder, it gives you the best insulation that you can possibly get. You can flip it upside down to feed fondant. It does everything you want it to do, and it doesn't cost that much once you add all of these bits together. So before you leave this video, we are not finished yet. What I'm going to do is I'm going to show you how happy these bees are in this system here. Polyashforth feeder is the very best, and what you can see here is the condensation forming in the coldest bit of the colony there. That plastic part of the feeder is not insulated well, and that's where all the condensation is forming right over to the edge. So this is why it's good to have a polyashforth feeder as opposed to a Miller feeder. It's not condensing down into that cluster. Bees need water in winter. They go out, they use it to break down their stores. So a little bit of water in the hive is actually beneficial for them, and they will go up and they will forage on that water. I'm going to open up the colony now. I'm not going to put my bee suit on. You might get a couple of stings to the face, but let me show you just how happy the bees are in this beehive. So here we go. Take a look at that. It's the middle of winter, end of January. It's about 7 degrees here today, and look how active my bees are. We're not into a tight cluster because they're so warm, they're so well insulated. They're up at the top there, they're all coming out to get me now, but just look at that for a winter cluster. I'm so, so happy with this setup. So if you remember, I did improve the temperament of a lot of my colonies last year. Didn't get stung there, you saw a lot of the bees flying up as well. Got a little friend on the camera there, he's just come to say hello. I can feel that there's some going up the back of my jacket as well, so they're going to have a really good time stinging me in the back. If I was starting again, that's the system I would use. If you've got any specific questions, click the link below, ask me a question, and I'll answer it on one of my live streams.
