This Is My Perfect Beehive - Simple UK Hive Setup That Really Works

Today in Richard's Apiary, we're going to talk about standard setups of beehives, wood versus poly, and what Richard's favourite setup is to make sure that he gets the very best out of his colonies. So Richard, how do you set up your colonies, and do you have like any specific favourite types of hive or material, or come on, what's your setup?

Well, my setups are all different, Lawrence. I'm leaning in Wales big time towards poly, just because it's damper. In terms of endurance, I wonder if the hives have a lifespan the same as wood. The drawbacks of poly are the sterilisation and the cleaning off. Obviously you can't boil a poly box, so that process is much more time-sapping. But I do think for doing nuc production, it definitely outweighs the wood. And the honey production side is all wood, mostly now on national frames. I think I'd rather run 2 brood boxes with national frames than a commercial box or a 14x12. I mean, I'm getting older, so if you can imagine you're looking at 40 to 60 frames, boxes a day with 12 frames in, in Herefordshire, your thumbs and your fingers don't really want to turn their lugs over with a 14x12 or a commercial frame all day. So, so yeah, I mean, I think a standard frame is, is ideal, and it gives you great flexibility to whether you want a big brood nest or a small brood nest. Some people would argue the break in between is a problem, but I don't find that.

So if we were to get in our car and go to Hereford now, what would be the configuration of the colonies if they still had honey on? What's your floor, brood box, queen excluder, supers, roof? Tell me about the setup of your colonies and how you have them set up.

So I'd say they're 50/50 split of Varroa screens and solid floors. I started with Varroa floors probably only about 5 years ago, made my own, but I'm still not convinced that they're any better than a solid floor. Solid floor, just because of the fact is if you get a swarm go out with a clipped queen, it always hangs underneath, which is a real pain. I would go with a single brood box. I mean, but now there's an increasing number of Buckfast queens in Hereford and ones I've bred which are very prolific. They definitely need 2 brood boxes. And then I would say an average hive, you can probably manage on 3, 4 supers quite easily. So in your shed, if you've got If you've got 2 or 3 hives, each with a brood box or 2 brood boxes really in your shed, you should at least have 3 supers for each hive. It is everybody's, every beekeeper's nightmare to run out of kit halfway through the season. And believe it or not, I have done that in the past. And you tend to then just grab anything and chuck it on, which just ends up with a mess at the end of the season. So prep is everything.

So that recommendation of 3 or 4 supers per hive, is that on the basis of a spring extraction? Or is that just leaving them for the whole year?

Well, if you've got a good spring flow, you could have 3 supers early, 3 supers late. The only reason for a spring extraction, in my view, is that that is going to set in the comb. Probably if you're in a good area and it was all sort of not going to set, you probably do want 4 or 5 supers per hive. But it depends whether you want to, you know, you can take honey off at any time of year, and if you want to spread the workload or whether you just want to do it in one go at the end.

Yeah, I used to kind of take a spring crop and then a summer crop, and then I got a bit lazy and thought I'd just do it all at the end of the year and do a summer crop. And it kind of didn't work exactly as I thought, because what I have to do now, if you've got big colonies and they've got 5 or 6 supers on, like, you're doing weekly inspections and you're taking off all those big heavy boxes. Like, it's a real slog, isn't it?

Yeah.

So in between your supers and your brood boxes, then what about queen excluders? Do you have a preference, a kind of type that you like to use?

No, whatever's cheapest and I can get for reasonable money. There we go, I like that.

Whatever's cheapest. And I find that I've done videos comparing different types of queen excluders, and I've got some lovely like oak-framed wire ones with the bee space, and they are nice, but they do kind of break just as regularly as the other ones, and they're loads more expensive. And I do find that just the good quality cheap plastic ones are probably my favorite.

Yeah, I think if somebody was going to give me a big pot of money, I'd have all stainless steel, and they would definitely be all with the bars.

So the wires as opposed to the punched ones?

Yeah, as it is at the moment, they're all punched.

They're all punched. And is it— do you go for metal or plastic?

I've got a mixture of both.

Got a mixture of both?

Yeah. Okay.

Um, and then in terms of a roof, what, what would you go— so do you use like a crown board or a feeder or a roof? Like, what do you have at the top?

I'm tending to go to the preference of just putting the feeder straight on top of the, the, the box.

As a crown board?

Yeah, as a crown board. I mean, it all goes back to the cleaning. There's less cleaning for me then. And either a poly roof Or a galvanised tin roof.

Okay, so you're, you use like a polyashford feeder then, and you leave that on all year?

My box, my feeders stop with their boxes from the time they leave the shed to the time they come back in to be melted down, and then everything's cleaned and the cycle starts again.

Okay, so even though they never go on a different beehive, every year they come off, you give 'em a clean?

No, no, no, I leave them until that cycle of that hive is, you see the drone layer.

Okay, I got you. Okay, yeah. So they could be there for 10 years if—

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

Not very often.

No, not very often. Okay, cool. So it's a relatively standard setup then. No underfloor entrances, never tried underfloor entrances on the floors, never found the need for them. And then that single brood, double brood debate. If money wasn't an issue and you had Buckfast bees, would you double brood everything?

Everything, I think, yes.

Yeah, you would go double brood.

And it also would give the bees, because they are so prolific in the brood nest, It would always give, when you take them supers off, there's always that tendency to probably take too much honey off, and you'd hope with a double brood box there would always be sufficient stores, whereas I've took supers off a single brood box with Buckfast bees and you go back in a week and you could end up with a dead hive.

And then I've done a video previously showing like not using shallow boxes at all and using everything as National Deeps. Is that anything you'd ever consider?

Definitely not.

Definitely not.

No, I'm getting older. I'm not weak by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that, you know, I always say a full super of honey, a shallow one, can be 30 pounds. Well, by the time you've carried 60 or 70 of them in a day, you know, to think of going to brood boxes would be ridiculous.

Yeah, and I think the temptation always exists when you have like all on national deep boxes just to kind of move the queen excluder around, so then you end up getting brood being reared in your supers. And Richard's like grimacing as I say it. I can see it and hear the grimace, because then if you've got a box that's a national deep that's had brood reared in it, and then you put a queen excluder underneath it and you turn it into a super again, and then that moves around, it becomes a real vector for disease. So definitely don't want to be doing that. Okay, so we've ruled that one out. And then in terms of wood versus poly, then what poly boxes do you like? Have you, have you used many of them?

Well, basically the setup we use is a Paynes 6-frame nuc And then the BS Honeybee 6-frame, which you can split in half.

So they're for your nucs. So do you have a preference out of both of those?

Not really, because they serve us 2 different purposes. So I put my cells in the 3-framers and then transfer them to the BS Honeybees, to the, to the panes, sorry.

And why do you use the panes? I know the answer to this, but why do you use the panes as the vehicle to kind of send the nucs out?

Just because they're so adaptable in the sense of They've got the built-in feeder, they've got that piece of Perspex on the top so you can keep an eye without disturbing the bees. And I actually— most people would shake their head at this, but I actually really like that side feeder just because I like to fill it and it's easy to do.

It is interesting, like me and Richard, we agree on a lot of stuff and we disagree on a lot of stuff as well, and we have lots of good conversations about it. And I remember when I was trying to convince Richard to go over to Buckfast Bees from his Herefordshire Vikings, he was doing the exact same to me with the Payne's boxes. And Richard's a real big fan of the Payne's boxes. And at that point, I really didn't like the Payne's boxes. I didn't like that side feeder at all. But now moving into the amount of nucs that we send out, like, that's where for me the Payne's box really does come into its own because it's perfect for sending in the post. It really is the perfect nuc to send out in the post. Um, really easy to screw the roof down. But the biggest benefit for me on the Payne's nuc is that once you screw that roof down with a ventilated screen, The package that you're delivering to the customer has the integrated feeder in there, which means that we can send it out to people really early on in the year because they're overwintered in the Payne's nucs. We can send them out and we can give people the advice that you can leave them in that nuc for a few weeks, and if you need the ability to feed your colonies, you've got it in the side feeder. Try doing that with any other nuc where you have a top feeder and it becomes like a real logistical nightmare in terms of how do you send it out. Like, you can't screw down from the top because then you've not got the top ventilation, the nuc might die. You can't put it at the bottom because it doesn't fit, and it just becomes a real logistical nightmare. The Payne's nuc, none of those issues whatsoever. So then in terms of poly boxes, actual like full-size poly boxes, you've got any experience of those? Any favorites?

My definitely would be the Abelo just because of the durability of the poly, but I've only been running them for about 2 years. But very easy to clean, very easy to pressure wash. You've got to spend the money.

I 100% agree on that because I've got, you know, got loads of Abello hives, I've got loads of Suyenti hives as well. And when you put them through this sterilisation and cleaning cycle, the Abello boxes come out like new, like literally brand new, don't they? Perfectly clean poly, all of the edges are perfectly intact because they've got the plastic runners in there. And then the Suyenti just looks a bit battered still. And the runners are not so good, and the way that it connects around, not very good at all. So if you had an endless supply of money and all of your beehives were gone and you were starting again to run some beehives for honey production, what would you go for? I'm buying them, go on, it's on me. I'll buy all of these for you. What are you going to have?

I'd definitely go with Abelo.

Okay, so full hives with the supers and everything?

Everything with Abelo, yeah.

And any specific variant of the Abelo? They've got the new 12-frame box with the interlocks, or they've got the 11-frame box.

The one that you've got is the 11-frame box. I don't have experience with the 12-frame, but I believe the external dimensions are probably a little bit bigger.

Yeah.

So no, I'd stay with the 11 because that is just more versatile within, you know, an apiary where you might use other stuff. The only thing I probably wouldn't do with a Nibello box is use their floor.

Okay.

I would probably stay with a wooden floor.

Yeah. Just for the simple, what, sterilizing?

And I don't like the way all them pull-out bits are, but that is just personal. Everything I try and run has got to be easy, it's got to be maintainable, and it's got to have a, you know, to be done in the timescale. I haven't got endless time just to go and clean stuff, so it all has to be done in that timescale, and that is really the reason.

So there we go, I've got my favorite beehive, Richard's got his favorite beehive, everyone has like a slightly different slant on this. If you want to tell me your favorite beehive, definitely stick it in the comments. I'll be interested to see the different variations of favorite beehives across all the people that watch the channel.