What Is A Long Hive - Hyde Hives Long Hive Review For UK Beekeepers

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. In this video, I'm going to review this 14 by 12 UK-made cedar long hive made for me by Hyde Hives. So a massive thank you to Hyde Hives. They have given me this 14 by 12 long hive free of charge. That's a really, really big gift, so thank you so much to the team at Hyde Hives. In this video, I'm going to review the hive. I'm going to talk you through all of the features. We're going to take a look inside, see how it works, have a look at how well the product is made, talk to you a little bit about how you can put bees into it, and just give you a general overview of the product. Now, later on in the season, I'm going to do lots and lots of videos with this hive here. I'm going to show you how to put bees into it, show you how to do swarm management, show you how to use it in terms of splitting stuff up between the brood area and the supers, and just give you a really good feel of how to run a long hive throughout the season. So before we get into the review, I think it's important to talk a little bit about the differences between a long hive and a top bar hive, because this probably from that angle as well does look a bit like a top bar hive, and it's not. It's very, very different. So what this is is a standard 14 by 12 long hive, and what that means is that it's not a vertical National hive. So although it uses a National frame, in this instance a 14x12, it's not stacked up in a vertical fashion. So it's very much a horizontal hive similar to the top bar hive. So all of your frames are on one platform like that, but the difference between this and a top bar hive is that you can put standard frames in it. So they do Langstroth versions, they do normal National versions, they do a 14x12 version. What this isn't is where you just put the bars in and let the bees draw that comb down naturally. We're going to do a separate video on that. I'm going to get a separate top bar hive as well, but that is the difference between a long hive and a top bar hive. So you might be looking at this hive and thinking it's big, and definitely is big. It's enough for 2 colonies, and the first thing that I thought was that that roof's really, really big and it's going to be really difficult to lift up and close, and it's potentially going to blow over in the wind. Hyde Hives, They are perfectionists and they have thought of everything. So I can lift the roof with literally one hand and it's on gas-powered struts. Close it down again, one hand, and it clicks back into place. So it's not going to blow down on you when you're actually working this hive. It's just really nicely designed. Such a big roof, you wouldn't want that kind of falling down. You could potentially break the hinges. So you can close it with one hand, you can open it with one hand. Really, really nice kind of gas-powered strut design, and that is absolutely solid there. Really, really nice design. So the roof material is something called phenolic ply, and I actually hadn't come across that name before. I know what it is. It's the same ply that they use in trailer bases. So if you've got a trailer, they make the base out of this ply. It's effectively a film-coated ply. It's going to last for ages and ages. You look how long some of the trailer floors last. They do last for years and years. That's going to shed all the water down because it's purposely built to shed water. Water-resistant films that are embedded on the top like that. All of the joints are sealed and then it's sealed along the top as well. Really, really nice finish on the roof as well. All the corners cut really nicely. Everything joins up, everything's sealed, and I think it looks really nice as well. There's no getting away from it. A gabled roof, in my opinion, looks so much better than a flat roof, but it— you lose some of the practical benefits that you would get if you were running, say, a commercial operation or you wanted to stack supers on them. With a long hive, you don't need any of that anyway, so you might as well go with something that looks really, really nice. So in terms of the depth of the roof, I think it's about a 9mm ply. It's a nice thick solid ply, and that's going to last for years. So then when you open up the hive, you get 4 if you've got the long hive version, or 2 if you've got the short hive version, of these acrylic crown boards. If you're the kind of person that wants to keep bees in your garden, you're going to want to check up on them over winter. You're going to want to see that everything's okay. You can do that with a clear acrylic crown board. It's flat on one side here because you're running this on a top beespace system, so the acrylic crown board just sits directly on the frames like that. And then on the top side, you've got an integrated eke. It's about 20 mm deep, perfect if you want to use Apiguard or any other varroa treatment that needs an eke. It's got an integrated mesh hole in the middle, so if you want to pop a feeder, like a rapid feeder, directly on the top there, you can feed on these as well. And then you've got a perfectly round hole to feed fondant directly on there. If I was doing that, I'd put the fondant in a takeaway cup, put it on top directly over the cluster. You've got the ability to move this where you need it to be, get it directly over the cluster. You've got a really nice versatile feeding system. So this crown board is great, the whole system is great. You've got the option for a Varroa treatment eek, you've got the option to feed rapid feeders by going through the hole, you've got an option to have just a hole there to feed fondant, and then you've got the nice fact that it's a crown board, a clear crown board, so you can see your bees without actually interfering with them and cracking open any of the seals. So you get 4 of these crown boards. The ends here are made with ply. All the joints are really nice. They're glued onto that acrylic. They're going to last for a very long time. Everything fits together really nicely. Final thing I'll say about the crown board is it's not flimsy acrylic or polycarbonate. It's about 6 or 7mm. That is plenty of depth in order to get a nice heavy feeder on there. You don't want any bowing on it, and it's a really nice solid polycarbonate board. So then what you also get, and I'll do a few close-ups just to make sure that all of this equipment ties in and you can see how it works, you get divider boards. So these are effectively dummy boards, means you can dummy the colony down within the long hive. You get a solid one with a Portabee escape on it. If you wanted to change that over, you can just pop that out, put a rhombus bee escape on, that would work as well. If you needed to, you could just block that up with a piece of tape just over the top there, and then you can use that as a dummy board as well. So when you're putting your colony in, you might start off with a nuc, You might give it an additional 1 or 2 frames either side, and then you're going to start dummying that colony out by using the dummy board. So you get 2 of those, one for each colony. Gives you the ability just to manage the colony size through the use of a dummy board. So these are made with a really nice quality ply. It's a 12mm ply. What I would say is just put a seal around the edge of these. You can seal and treat all of this if you want, so the exterior, the interior if you want. Personally, I'm not a fan of sealing them because it means that you have to kind of repeatedly do it over and over again within every kind of couple of years. I quite like the look of grey cedar, so when it gets a bit old, it gets a bit grey. Cedar lasts really, really well in the UK weather without any sealant anyway. But what I would say is on these edges here, I would just put some sort of beeswax sealant or PVA glue or some Vaseline just to stop any of that water ingress. Just best practice, and it's just what I do with all of my follower boards. So then you're probably kind of thinking, how do these even work, these long hives? And this is the most critical piece of equipment that you're going to get with a long hive. It is the queen excluder. So instead of having a normal system where you have a horizontal queen excluder like that, obviously in these vertical system beehives you have a vertical queen excluder, and it works exactly the same as a normal beehive. You're going to restrict your brood to one side, and then you're going to have honey on the other side depending on which entrance that you're using. Obviously the closer to the entrance is where you're going to have the brood. And then the beauty of a queen excluder system like this is that you can adjust it frame by frame. So in a wooden national system, you can have say 10 or 11 frames in the bottom box. And then if you want to move the queen excluder, you need to go up to the next box. So you're doubling up from say 10 or 11 to 20 or 22. With this system, you can really begin to analyze how big of a brood nest your colony needs in order to get the maximum honey crop from them, or in order for them just to be happy and not swarm. Yeah. You might think, I don't want to keep bees for honey and I'm just not going to use a queen excluder and I'm just going to let them fill that void and they can just do what they want, put the brood wherever, put the honey wherever, and they might be happier like that. And there's nothing wrong with that system at all, but having a vertical queen excluder like this gives you the ability to monitor and adjust your brood nest a lot more accurately than, say, the wooden national system, because you could have a 7-frame brood nest, you can have an 11-frame brood nest, You can have a 14-frame brood nest. You can just choose what suits you and what suits your bees. So the queen excluder is made out of a plastic molded queen excluder. You know that I like my plastic molded queen excluders, and then it's just put together with, with really nice solid ply, and it's screwed at the top. I always look for a screw there because I kind of cheaped out when I made my follower boards and any of the, the vertical frames that I make because I pinned them. So when I was doing my follower boards, I just glued and pinned them. Couple of them have come apart. People did warn me about this. Really nice to see these are not only chamfered down, but they're screwed and glued, so they're going to last a very, very long time. Screwed on that side as well. When you're putting everything in here, and I'll do some close-ups, it's really nice to see that the spacing's correct, and it shows that they're really experienced because in hives like this, everything needs to be square. You really do need to make sure that everything's square and all the measurements are correct because obviously the bees, If they start messing around with the bee space, they're going to clamp things up, clamp things down, but everything's not too tight. So they've not got a bee space entrance either side. It's just 2 or 3 millimeters, just so it's going to fill in nicely. So then along all of the front of the hive, you've got monitoring boards. So these are varroa monitoring boards, or you can put them in to convert it to a solid floor, effectively blocks out any draft from underneath. These are made from the same phenolic resin plywood as the roof is. So these are going to last forever. It's just a piece of phenolic resin and then you've got a piece of baton on the front there. And as I always look for in my poly national hives and wooden national hives, there is adequate depth to do a proper monitor on this. So when you pull it out, you've got about 7 or 8 millimeters to actually get out some of that detritus and have a look of what's going on. It's not going to knock it out as you take the tray out. So those trays obviously lead you to the floor of the long hive and the— it's got full Varroa floor, so an open mesh floor all the way along the hive. Gives you the ability to have it running as that if you want, so you want to take it out on warm days, then you can put the trays back in. If you want to close it up, say for overwinter, or you want to do some monitoring, you've got the full flexibility that you would have on any standard wooden national floor. You can either have it as an OMF or you can have it as a closed-up solid floor. So then on to the entrances. So you have an entrance on this side and then you have an entrance on that side, so there are effectively 2 long hives sitting back to back. So you're going to have bees flying off in that direction and you're going to have bees flying off in that direction. You get a nice entrance reducer just like you'd get on a wooden National. You can pop that in, reduce the size of the entrance down to manage against wasps. What you probably don't need on this hive is any sort of mouse protection. It would be a very nimble mouse to try and get up some of those legs. Not to say that it won't happen, something that I'll keep an eye on, but I think we'll probably be all right without any mouse guards on any of those entrances. Now what some people will be very happy about is that you do have a nice landing board there. And by the looks of it, and I'll have to double-check this with Hyde Hives, I think that's an oak landing board. And I think that there might just be a reason for that, just because it's probably the only horizontal piece of wood that's going to actually collect any water on it. So I think they've gone with a slightly different wood there. Matt, if I'm wrong, please do correct me on that. I'm not 100% sure. But it's a really nice size entrance board. It's got a nice slope to it, so it should shed a lot of the water. And then obviously it's a garden hive. This is something for people who love the look of beehives, people who want to sit there and they want to enjoy the hive, they want to enjoy the bees. So it definitely needs a landing board. Fully get it and understand it in this situation, and I think it adds to the really nice look of the hive as well. So a couple of other things, you have bee escapes connected to the top similar to what you'd get in a WBC, and that's just to let any bees out that potentially get up into that roof void there. You don't want them getting stuck up there and dying, and it might be a little bit easier if you leave one of those cover boards a little bit ajar so you get a couple of bee escapes. And then it comes with a really nice cedar stand as well, and it's great to see that they haven't gone down the cheaper option and said, right, we'll just do a pine stand. I think you need to have that cedar there because especially in my instance, you're going to have this probably on slightly wetter ground. I'm going to try and develop something to just to lift it off the ground to stop that water ingress upwards. The cedar is definitely going to last a lot longer than say a pine stand. But it's a really nice put-together stand. Like, it looks nice, it's solid. I love the splayed legs. I think splayed legs like that look so good. My woodwork skills are atrocious, and I've tried to do things with splayed legs before, and it's just like absolute comedy effort. And then you look at this and it's just perfect down to the millimeter. Really nice, even splayed legs, splayed in 2 directions as well, so it gives you excellent lateral stability. There is no way this is going to topple over. It's got a really nice low center of gravity. And then the splayed legs in 2 directions like that gives it really good stability as well. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of a better look inside the hive, different angle. So you've got the entrance down here, entrance reducer in there, and then you've got your, your dummy board, your follower board here, slots in nicely. And then you've got your queen excluder, like I said, molded plastic pine-bound queen excluder. And then as you can see, it just takes a 14x12 frame or any national frame that you want. Obviously you need to buy it for the correct size frame. This one here, I've gone for a 14x12 version, but it all just sits in there really, really nicely. And as I said before, this is a top bee space hive, so it should be a really nice easy one to manage. And what that means is that the, the top bee space, as you know, sits on top of the frames, but it means you can have flush crown boards. So these are completely flush And they just sit on top like that. Now obviously the attention to detail has gone there, so the queen excluder and the follower board have their frames flush with the top of the box here, and then that gives you adequate seal all the way around. So the bees can't travel over the queen excluder, they can't travel over the dummy board either. So we're going to do lots and lots of videos on this hive because I think it's an absolute beauty. The guys at Hyde Hives very, very generously gave me this one for free, So I'm going to do a nice few videos for them. I'm really excited by this one. But just to give you a feel of what you would actually do in this video when you've got, say, a colony or a nuc to put it in here. So the way that I would set up this colony is I would set it up as close to the entrance as possible. You need to put the nuc into the entrance end. You need the bees at the entrance end. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to manage them properly with the follower board. So if I was taking my colony of bees, I would install my nuc at this end here. There's only 3 frames there, let's assume this is a 3-frame nuc. I would then take my queen excluder and I'd pop my queen excluder up next to it, just to get them used to the queen excluder, and then I would take my follower board and I would put my follower board next to it as well. So if I was doing this on, say, a 3-frame colony, I'd probably add in a couple of extra frames, one on either side like that, so you've got a nice 5-frame nuc. 3 frames, 1 frame of foundation on one side, another frame of foundation on the other side, and then I would put my follower board in. So effectively all I'm using is this space at the front here. It gives you the ability to manage that colony size perfectly. That's what this hive is all about. Then you would take your board like this and you would place that over the top. And then I always see a little bit of an issue I've got there, that the feeder hole is not going to be aligned up. So what I would do is I'd just move it along a little bit, and when you're doing this with a 6-frame nuc, you're not going to have any problems. I tried that there with a 3-frame. So then you're going to have the feeder hole sitting directly over the colony, and with a nuc, I'd always go straight away, get some feed into them, get them to draw out the foundation, get the colony going until it gets to really nice weather. They're bringing in nectar and they're bringing in pollen. That's always my method. And then what I would do throughout the season as the colony grows You keep on moving that follower board a little bit along, add another frame in. Keep on moving it along, add another frame in, until you get to the point where they've stopped expanding that brood nest and they're starting to store honey. And then you've got the perfect opportunity to say, right, I'm going to use my queen excluder here. Let's assume that frame there is honey, that frame there is brood. Put your queen excluder in, make sure the queen is on the brood side. And then you've got your normal colony operating conditions. You've got your brood all in one side, eggs, larvae, and the queen, queen excluder, and then you've got your foundation or your drawn comb on the other side, and that's going to be where they collect their honey. Because there's going to be a full brood area, they're not going to be able to collect it there. They're going to come through, go through the queen excluder, put it into the foundation or draw out that foundation, and then store the honey in the drawn comb. So that's going to be the system that I'm going to use. Just wanted to run you through exactly how that would work on this system for the purpose of this review. So that's it for the review. I just wanted to give you a quick snapshot as to all of the features of this hive. I'm going to do more videos on this. You're going to see a lot of this hive, so if you're interested in it, stay tuned. Make sure you hit that subscribe button because we're going to do a lot of long hive videos this year. Like I said, we'll do some swarm management in it. I'll show you how to stock it with a colony, show you how to get some honey out of it as well. And I'll just show you kind of how well it does in the UK weather. Now if you're interested in buying one of these hives though, these come highly recommended by me. You can just tell the workmanship that's gone into it is exceptional. The quality of the wood is really, really nice. It's definitely really top quality UK-grown timber, so it's not shipped over here from Canada. This is wood that has been felled within the UK, I believe Leicestershire. they cut it down into planks, they build bespoke beehives that are made in England, made with English wood. So if you want a nice sustainable good-looking hive, definitely give the guys at Hyde Hives a shout and they can sort you out with a really good-looking beehive. So I hope you enjoyed that, something a little bit different from the numerous polyhive reviews that I do. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.