UK Exclusive - Fully Moulded Plastic National Frames - First LOOK

Today I've got a UK exclusive for you from a company called framesandfeeders.com. So I'm really pleased to be able to finally get hold of a copy of these, and these are the first in the world UK national fully moulded black wax-coated foundation frames. That was a little bit of a mouthful, but I've been waiting for these for a long time. Little bit of a production issue trying to get them out, but I'm really pleased to report that these are finally out onto the market. In today's video, I'm going to give you a review of the product, my first impressions, and then we're going to put them into some hives and we'll do some follow-up videos to see how they perform. Now these were given to me free. 10 frames were sent to me, value of about £40. Not paid for the review and I get to say what I like. But I am so, so excited to take a look at these frames and tell you what I think. So I used some of these frames earlier on in the year in a Langstroth format. A couple of other companies run them as a Langstroth format, and as soon as I saw these come onto the market, I was really, really interested. You get so many benefits by using these kind of frames. But you also get potentially some disbenefits as well. So we'll talk about both sides of that on this video. What's good about them, what's bad about them, some of the risks that are involved as well, and then you can make your mind up for yourself. So I think it's fair, let's start off with the bad things. First one is it's plastic. Now everybody kind of looks at that and thinks, yeah, we shouldn't be using plastic, plastics are bad, shouldn't be producing more plastics, you've got the recycling problem. But you know what, I think they've done quite a lot of research into these plastics, and as far as what they say about these frames and I will do my own testing on it as much as I possibly can, but they're saying that these are fully recyclable. So the plastic, as long as you can heat it up, scrape it down, clean it off, you can go and put this plastic into the recycling and it's readily recyclable. So you don't need a specialist recycling center, this can just go in any hard recycling tip at your local recycling center. So okay, you're producing more plastic, but at least it's readily recyclable. The only other negative that I can potentially see cropping up later on is that if you need to do any sort of heat treatment on these, either for getting honey off them or rewaxing them or sterilizing them if you've got any disease, maybe you might have an issue with them warping. But you know what, I can't say that that's an issue because I've not tried it out myself. I'll definitely have a go at it later on in the season though. Maybe we'll put them through some heat treatment and see how they come out. Maybe do some pressure washing on it as well. Put them through their paces and see how they actually cope. I know Rob, the owner of the company, would be more than happy for me to do that, and I'll feed back honest results and see how they get through those trials. But that's enough about the negatives though. Let's talk about some of the positives. For me, the number one huge positive that you get from using a frame like this is that they come in the post and they're ready to go into a colony. You don't need to assemble the frame, you don't need to put foundation in, You don't even need to get malt and wax and start loading it up onto the plastic foundation sheet on here because it's all already done for you. Now, maybe if you've got, say, 2 or 3 colonies in the garden, that's not going to be the biggest issue for you, and you might be looking at some of the other benefits of this product. But for me, that is the biggest time saver in the world. When you're looking at buying kind of like 500 or 1,000 frames, and you'd be surprised, you only need kind of like 25 or 30 hives to actually get up to that number of frames. That assembly and waxing and re-waxing and that iterative process year on year becomes incredibly time-consuming. So I've always longed for a product like this, which is a ready-made solution that just cuts out all of that rubbish, all of that time-consuming stuff that I do not want to do in winter, and does it for a pretty reasonable price. So I'll touch on price on these now. At the moment, prices can always change depending on when you're watching this video, These are £4 each for the DN4 national size. They're doing shallows as well, and they're also doing like a jumbo variant of 14 by 12 international, and the prices will vary across that range of sizes. I actually think that's a really reasonable price, and if you compare that on the market to what is available— so you can get an assembled wooden frame with either plastic foundation or wax foundation as a set of 10 That is around a similar price point, so around £40. But what that means is that once you get through a single cycle, you're going to need to go back in and either re-wax that or do some work to it. With this, that whole cycle should be a little bit easier, shouldn't take you anywhere near as long. Also, you'd like to think that the plastic will outlast the wood. Obviously, as you're moving through, you're going to get to a point where the frames are going to become gnarly, they're going to become old, they're going to snap, they're going to break, you're going to lose your lugs. I like to think that these will last a lot, lot longer. So, this one that I've got here in front of me, I'll do some close-ups in a little bit. Really nice injection-moulded design. It's one piece. That piece of foundation there doesn't just slot in. It's all fully moulded as a single piece. It's quite rigid. You get a little bit of give in it, but really not that much at all. And then on the lugs up here, you've got really nice strong lugs. Nice little logo on the top as well. Maybe I would have left that out, and maybe on future ones I'd say maybe don't have the frames and feeders on there. I know it's nice to put the promo in there, but you know what's going to happen, that's just going to get covered in gunk. I'd like to have that completely flat so I could clean it off with my hive tool. So this copy that I've got here, this is the unwaxed version, no wax on it whatsoever, but when you buy these from Frames and Feeders, they will come ready waxed, and that's what I've got here. So this one here is a ready pre-waxed version, and you'll be very glad to hear that I didn't wax this one myself and completely melt my kitchen worktop. So this is a pre-waxed variant direct from Frames and Feeders, and this is the one that I'm going to put into my colony today. So apart from the time-saving benefit of using a frame like this, there are some other real benefits in there as well. The one that I like, and the one that I'm probably going to use most of these frames for, is heather, heather honey. The problem that you've got with heather honey, as we all know, you can't extract it normally. You need to do it tangentially, and you need to loosen it first. Loads of equipment, really expensive equipment, and a lot of people go down the route of pressing the honey. Pressing honey with a combination of something like this frame here will work so, so well. I tried to do it before where you kind of go into the midrib of the foundation with a knife, with one of the specialist tools, with a hive tool, and you're trying to kind of get that honey off the frame without completely wrecking the frame, and it is impossible. It's very, very difficult to do. But if you can imagine a frame like this, putting it in as a honey super, and the bees are going to build out that wax foundation, store loads of honey on there. When you come to extracting that heather honey, obviously you can just extract this normally as a normal frame, tangentially extract it, get the loosener in there and manage it that way. But the way that I'm probably going to do it is I'm just going to get my hive tool, get something sharp, and just carve off all the honey back down to this plastic foundation here, stick it into the wax cappings press and process it that way. That will leave me with frames that can just go back directly onto the hive, and the bees will build that out again because you're leaving behind that remnants of wax. So I think this has got a really good use for people that don't want to actually have to extract honey. So I use the example there for me in terms of where I might use it in the heather operation, extracting heather honey and using it to get into a position where you can press it. But if you just want a couple of hives in your back garden and you don't want to have to purchase an expensive honey extractor, and you're just gonna go with the crush and strain method, then I cannot think of a better frame than this one here. It's fully molded, gonna work just as a normal frame in terms of storing honey, and then you can just scratch it back to that midrib, that plastic foundation, crush and strain all of your honey, and just put the frames back in the hive and the bees will work it out again. That's the theory anyway. I'm definitely gonna have a go on that, see how well that works over the year. But I think that's a really good tool for beekeepers to have if you don't want to mess around trying to extract your honey using like a centrifugal extractor. Right, I'll go and get my bee suit on. I'm going to go over to some beehives, put one of these in a super, put some of them in the brood area, and then I'll do a follow-up video showing you how well the bees are drawing out the frames, if they've turned it into brood, if they've turned it into honey, and then I'll give you regular updates just to see how these frames are getting on. Right, so this colony here is the perfect one to try out these new frames. It's honey-bound down in the brood, Honey bound up in the supers, it needs space, and instead of splitting the frames around a little bit, all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this 11-frame Abello box here, filled up with the frames and feeders, wax-coated frames. I've got 10 wax-coated frames and 1 frame that's not wax-coated, and I've done that really deliberately to show you the difference on how the bees react to both of those types. You can actually translate that to me thinking I had a 10-frame box here and I just got it a little bit wrong. Either one of those works. The reality was I got it wrong. So I'm going to put this one on here now. I'm going to stack everything back up again, and then I'll be able to come back in a couple of weeks and hopefully show you some of the frames that contain brood and some of the frames that contain honey. Now I'm not going to do any sort of cheating. There's going to be no feeding going on. There's going to be no interspersing with normal wooden wax foundation frames. They have got a box here completely full of these frames, as I really want to see exactly exactly how they get on. Right, so you'll notice on the frames as well, all of the logos are exactly the same way around apart from that one in the middle. That's going to serve to remind me when I come back to say that's the one that's not got the wax coating on it. All I'm going to do now, get the queen excluder on, stack up those honey supers, give it a couple of weeks, and see how well these frames work. As you can see though, perfect fit. DN4 spacings working a treat. I like that nice sharp point on the edge of the DM4 spacing there. Completely interchangeable with wooden equipment, wooden frames. Really, really like this design. Little snapshot there for anyone who's interested to see what the honey's looking like in these supers. Well and truly ready to be extracted. So there we go, boxes are on. Fast forward 2 weeks and I'll give you a snapshot and show you just how well those frames are doing.