This Hive Fixes A BIG Problem For ME!

Today I'm gonna give you a close-up look inside the Mini Plus National Hive from Abelo. So this hive here is currently in its prototype phase. It's basically 99% ready though, couple of minor tweaks that will find their way through to the finished product if anyone's placed any orders. This is an amazing beehive and I'm gonna show you some of the features which make it unique in the marketplace within the UK. So there's a few issues with standard mating hives I find, few difficulties, and if you're rearing a lot of queens, you just have to kind of overcome these difficulties. The first one is mating hives are very, very difficult to overwinter. In the UK, I would say you have zero chance, pretty much zero chance to get them through the winter because there's no way to feed them up to weight. It's generally not big enough to have enough bees in there to actually successfully overwinter. And the only way to make it work is kind of like by clustering up all of these different boxes together, and then you're just asking for loads of problems like that. So it's much easier just to dismantle all of your mating nucs at the end of the year and start them back up again in the season. But then when you're starting them back up again, one of the biggest issues and one of the biggest constraints that many people have, many bee farmers have, is that stocking the mini mating nucs is quite time-consuming, quite laborious, and there's a lot that can go wrong. So generally what you would do is you'd get some bees from your beehive. You want lots of young, nice nurse bees. You shake off all of the nurse bees into a container or a bucket, and then you want to get one big scoop of bees and you're chucking it into the mini mating hives. So that's time-consuming in itself. But then the big problem is that unless you get the bees to start immediately drawing wax, there's a risk they've absconded. And the risk that they've absconded is high until the new queen is mated and she started laying brood in there. So a much better, more effective, and more efficient approach is to make up the mating nucs with brood in already. But because you're generally on like different sizes, you're on little piddly little frames, to do that early in the season, very, very difficult. So you need to kind of come up with this system to get brood in the frames, to put them into the mini mating hives prior to putting your cells in, which is difficult, time-consuming, and a real hassle for most commercial bee farmers. So they don't do that. What they do is they shake bees off the hive, scoop them up, put them in, fingers crossed, hope for the best. The Mini Plus National Hive from Abello changes all of that, and it changes it with the addition of this brilliant frame. Now, this frame has been around for a while. It's not been available in the UK, but now it is available in the UK. So it's a very, very simple design. It is effectively a DN4 National frame. So what you're seeing there is a DN4 National frame with 2 extra sidebars along there. And then I can get that to focus. But then you've got this detail in the middle where you've basically got 2 frames that are coming together into one. And that is the unique differentiator of this beehive and of this frame system here. So what does that mean and what benefits does that give you over the other hives? So that there is a standard DN4 national frame. I can go and pop that off into a nuc, I can go and pop it off into a beehive. I could maybe have like 2 or 3 of these in every single beehive, and I'm just going to treat it like a normal frame throughout the season. Queen can use it, they can build it up, they can put brood in there. It's just a normal frame. But then when I want to come and stock this hive here, all I have to do is just take it apart and I've got my 2 little mini frames. Full of brood, full of bees. I can pop them straight into my mini mating hive, put the queen cell in immediately, and I'm queen rearing from day one. I've not got to wait, put all the bees in here, feed them, get them starting to draw out the frames, and then go back and put the queen cells in. Just do it all from day one. And it means that the chance that the bees are going to abscond has reduced dramatically. And I really do mean dramatically. When I started off using little mini mating hives, you might get 50% of them that absconded. Now I've got better and better at that, and I've learned different ways of doing it and putting them in at a certain time and keeping them closed in overnight and making sure they can access their syrup and then opening them up. And the rate of absconding has gone down, but you still do get colonies, the little mini mating hives that abscond. I think with this, with the brood inside, we're going to get that down to pretty much zero. So let's take a look inside the hive then. I've showed you the frames. Hive is a really, really nice simple design. So we've got a roof on the top, Love that cross face there on the roof. You might think that's just kind of like for design, but it's not. It means that there's no flat surfaces, means that the water will run off, means that the paintwork will last a whole lot longer. Really, really like that design. And then on the top there, we've got 2 feeders, very, very similar there to the polyashforth feeder. So it is a polyashforth feeder, but it's a dual polyashforth feeder. So the bees will just come up there, they'll go down and feed in the bottom there. These 2 extra bits of plastic do actually have a use, which I'll show you in a bit. But see underneath the feeder there, we've got the slots that go in, and that is where the bees are gonna go up, and that is where the bees are gonna get their feed. So really nice dual poly Ashforth feeder. Then the next step of the hive. So there we go, we've got a standard brood box there made in the same style as the Abello poly. So 160 grams per liter steam molded poly, really, really good for the bees, especially mini mating hives. You wanna give them as much insulation as you possibly can. So then if you take a look inside, you get this piece of wood. So standard piece of probably 12mm ply divider there. And then as you can see, if I just put that in, it's gonna stop any bees crossing from one side to the other. And then you can see at the bottom there, we've got a little ridge that it just sits on. Means that you've got 2 perfect little spaces for these frames to go. And as I said, these frames here, you're taking them out of your national nucs, taking them outta your national beehives. And then look, they just fit perfectly in like that. Some of the older style frame prototypes as well, these are put together In exactly the same way, but you can just see they're slightly different. They leave these gaps there. The new ones are considerably better. But as with all designs, you go through a few prototypes before you get to the one that you want. And there we go. That's my 2-frame configuration. You don't want it too tight in stuff like this. When the wood starts to swell, once you start getting bees in there, you're not gonna be able to get it out. So a little bit of space is actually a good thing. And because they're only small colonies, they're not gonna go wild creating tons and tons of comb. So that's probably how I'd set that up. Board in the middle, completely over the ridge. And then I just leave a little bit of space either side, split the difference, and there we go. That is the setup now complete. Now I said these 2 little bits of plastic did have a use. Damien had to tell me this, I didn't realize this, but you can take out that bottom bit there. So this is quite handy actually, this just slots in like that. You kind of get what I mean there, it basically sits there, gives you a landing board. But the actual design with the entrance here is that you can take it out, have a full entrance, put it down like that for a single bee space entrance, And then obviously turn it around completely and you can just fully close that up if you want to move it. So then once we take the box off like that, you can see we've got the base here, got your ridge underneath, you've got your removable ventilation. Very important for mating hives that you have ventilation there. Over the winter though, I definitely put the discs in there to make sure that you keep the bees nice and snug over winter. But I think in the summer it's quite useful to have full ventilation like that. So there we go, a first look at the Mini Plus National Hive from Abelo. It's not a cheap beehive, it's not a cheap mating hive, but if you buy it without the paint and you paint it yourself, and then you work out the cost based on the fact that this is actually 2 hives in one, it's pretty much comparable to an Apidea, which is the Rolls-Royce of the mini mating hives. I would definitely prefer to have one of these versus 2 Apideas because this gives you the flexibility to work much smarter, but it also means that you can overwinter your bees in this configuration. All I would do at the end of the year, take the divider out, merge those 2 colonies together, have 6 frames going into winter, feed them up really nice and strong, give them fondant if they need it over winter as well, and then I could just start again rearing very early on in the season, and that would save me so much time, so much effort, and okay, maybe I spent a little bit more money to achieve that.