What Is the Best Beehive Poly Hives vs Wooden Hives - Full Comparison for New Beekeepers

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountains in Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. As we said before, we now have a Patreon channel and people have requested a specific video that we're going to cover today, and that is which is better, poly hives or wooden hives? So I know a number of other beekeepers have done this video previously, but I thought I'd have my take on it. It's a really interesting one for me because I do have a lot of wooden hives, but you know I've got a lot of poly hives as well, probably about an 80/20 split, and I do like my poly hives, but I thought I'd do this video and just go through the pros and cons of both and come up with what I think is best, poly or wood. So we're going to go through the pros and cons of both poly hives and wooden hives, and then I'll tell you what I like best, whether it's a poly hive or wooden hive. Right, so start off with wooden hives. What do I like about wooden hives? So the big thing for me that I like, and I really do like this about wooden hives, is that they are so durable. Like, they are solid and they will last kind of 30 to 40 years. And you see some of the people with old supers, like, they're 50, 60 years old. If you get the correct grade of wood, so you want kind of like a really nice Western red cedar, doesn't need any any treatment or anything. I mean, the natural oils and resins in that wood give you a seriously durable product that can kind of last outside for 30 or 40 years, no problem. So that, for me, number one on the wooden hives is the durability. It's unbeatable. What else do I like about wooden hives? I like that they look quite nice. I think there's no debate whatsoever, the wooden hives look nicer than poly hives, 100%. What else do I like about wooden hives? I like that they are sustainable, and I put sustainable in inverted commas because I don't think it is as clear-cut as people make out. Yes, it's a sustainable product and it will naturally break down and decompose over time, but that's only part of it. Like, the western red cedar that is used to make the majority of the hives in the UK comes from Canada, so to get that wood chopped and felled and shipped over to the UK uses an Incredible amount of energy, of diesel, which pollutes the air and adds to greenhouse gases. So it's not as straightforward as everyone says and said wood is the green option. No, wood is the compostable, biodegradable option, but there are a lot of carbon gases associated with the production and associated more specifically with the transport. So if I had to choose one as a more sustainable option, it would be the wood. I'm not denying that. I think wood is more sustainable overall. But it's not quite as clear-cut as everyone makes out. So what else do I like about wood? Bees do well in wood. It's a good product. I mean, bees live in trees. They've chosen wood as their natural product to make hives out of. I know we use kind of thin, piddly, like 18mm wood or whatever it is, and they have big thick amounts of wood. We'll move on to that with the insulation for the poly. But it's a good versatile product, and it's basically what the bees have chosen for themselves. So I like the fact that it's kind of like a good versatile product and it's recyclable. What else do I like about wood? I like that you can scorch the boxes. This is a really, really big plus for me. It's a quick way to remove any diseases minus AFB from those colonies just by giving them a quick scorch. So they're really easy to clean, really easy to sterilize. Another thing I like about wooden boxes is it's so easy to make your own. Like, you can make your own boxes, if you're that way inclined and you've got better joinery skills than me, that's a cheap way of doing it. But you can make your own accessories to go with it as well, so you can make crown boards, you can make floors, you can make the roofs. I mean, I don't have a poly moulding press at home, but I do have a chop saw and I do have access to wood. So yeah, I like the kind of versatility of being able to make stuff with my own hands to fit my hives. And you can mix and match poly and wood, that's no problem. But everything that I make on my own is made out of wood. Another thing I like about wood is versatility, again, where you can modify boxes. So you can take, say, a brood box and you can split it down the middle and turn that into 2 kind of 5 or 6 frame nucleus colonies. You can do more stuff with wooden boxes than you can do with poly boxes. So I do like the versatility, and I like the ability for me to kind of get my hands on and make changes as I see fit. Right, what do I not like about wooden boxes? And there's not as many things on both sides here that I don't like about them. They've definitely both got more pros than cons, but the number one thing that I really dislike about wooden boxes is the weight. Like, they are so, so heavy, and if you're just— if you've been brought up using wooden boxes, you would have never realized how incredibly light poly boxes are. Wooden boxes You just can't move colonies around when there's a couple of supers on them. It's pretty much impossible to do it on your own. Poly boxes, I move boxes with 3 supers on and it's heavy and I have to use like a sack barrow, but I can get them up off the hive with a strap and I can put them onto the sack barrow and move them. So it does make things a lot easier for me, but the weight difference is massive. What else don't I like about wooden hives? Now, it generally was when I was kind of starting out in beekeeping that wooden hives cost a lot more than poly hives. So poly hives always had the advantage that they were considerably cheaper than wooden hives, and that was a reason that I didn't like wooden hives, because it was going to cost me a lot more. But now the costs have come right down, and you can get really, really good kind of quality EU-fabricated hives made out of pine and other stuff that you might need to paint, but they're really cheap. Like, I've seen people picking up a full hive With roof, floor, 2 supers for like £50 if you buy like a pallet worth, and that's crazy. That's so much cheaper than poly. So I think what used to be a real kind of pro for poly is now actually probably a pro for wood. I didn't like the fact that wooden hives were expensive, but now that's all changed, and I think wooden hives are probably a little bit cheaper than poly hives if you shop around. Another thing I don't like about wooden hives is they are very, very difficult to repair. It sounds a little bit counterintuitive because poly seems quite difficult to repair, but I've had this happen twice this year already. So I've had it happen with a wooden super and a poly super. I had a wooden super drop off my truck and fall on the ground with all frames in it, and it just smashed, and it just wasn't worth my time to try and put that together. Like, it had all sheared and all the wood had gone crazy. Like, I would have had to start cutting it up and Joining it and doweling it would have been so much work to kind of make that wooden box workable again. And I had the same with a poly where it kind of broke like that. I just glued it with some poly glue and put a screw in. Took me 5 minutes, and that box is— that box will be solid for years now. So I do find that wood is very, very difficult to repair. And it's— I mean, when you smash it up like that, it's just, just chuck it on the fire and use it to kind of warm your house. They're not that expensive, the boxes. Yeah, I mean, So yeah, that's probably what I would do if I broke any more wooden boxes and not try and repair them. So what else don't I like about wooden boxes? And this is probably the biggest one for me, is that the insulation properties of the boxes are nowhere near as good as the poly boxes. Now it really doesn't make a huge difference. You see some people say that the bees won't last unless they go in poly boxes. It's just not true. I think the differences are Incremental, but up here in North Wales, especially on some of these sites where we're high up, I do find that the bees really, really do come through the winter better in terms of numbers in a poly box. And the bigger one is that the expansion in the spring where the colony needs to keep that temperature up on the cold nights is phenomenal. The wooden boxes, I mean, they catch up and they're absolutely fine, and they get to a certain point in the season where they really are kind of Pretty much similar, but it's that expansion out of the spring. I find the poly boxes are a lot better. Also, when you're taking them to the heather, I always use poly boxes up there. You've got cold nights, you need to keep the brood nest warm, you need to keep the supers warm as well so they can evaporate the excess moisture from the honey. So that's my summary of wood. I've told you what I liked, I told you what I don't like. Now we're going to do the same for poly. I'll tell you what I like, tell you what I don't like. So, so Some of the things I like about poly— there is huge amount of options on the market now, and that one sits well and truly in the middle. So it's a pro and a con. It's a pro because you've got so much choice— Abello, Swenty, Pains, Paradise, Mazemore— there's loads of them. Um, so you've got lots of choice, which is definitely a good thing. The bad part of that is that some of them aren't so good, um, and the lack of compatibility. Compatibility really drives me mad. It's a real bugbear of mine that they don't fit other boxes. So if you go down the route of, say, a Maysmore or a Payne's, it won't fit with an Ultra National and it won't fit with a Suyenti or something like that. So I don't like the lack of compatibility. So for me, all of my poly boxes are either Suyenti or a Bellow, and the reason for that is the positive that I have is that it's interchangeable with my wooden components. So roofs, floors, crown boards, feeders, everything, queen excluders as well. That means that I'm not locked into a system, and that means I'm not locked into potential price rises from certain manufacturers. And I appreciate manufacturers do need to increase their prices, but I like to kind of have the freedom to access all of the different systems and components on the market and choose the cheapest. We know we like cheap here at Black Mountain Honey. Some of the other pros then, and we touched on this before, I love the fact that poly is so incredibly light. It's just crazy how light these hives are. I mean, I've got like 14 by 12 hives here with a floor, with a feeder, with a roof on, strapped up, and I can just lift them up with one hand. Try doing that with a wooden hive with a wooden floor, wooden roof, wooden box. It's so heavy, it's a two-handed job, and as soon as you start chucking supers onto it as well, it makes it It's so difficult. But my standard is a floor, 14 by 12, queen excluder, 2 supers, and a roof, and that fits in my pickup truck. And even when that's pretty much full, I can lift that up. It's a bit difficult. I can lift it up and get it onto the trailer or get it into the pickup truck. That saves me so much time, not having to reduce the colonies down to get them ready for transport. So I really, really like that. It's very light material. Another thing, and we touched on this before, the insulation benefits of poly are really, really superb. I'd say they're more important when you're using nucs because you've got small colonies that struggle to keep the temperature up. I'd say in a full colony, the insulation in poly is no doubt better, there's no denying that, but I really don't think there's too much in it. So if you're looking to kind of— you're summing them up, don't use insulation as a reason to buy poly over wood. There's not a huge amount in it. And when I say that, I don't mean the difference in insulation isn't huge. The bees just adapt to whatever they're put in and they manage regardless. So you look at all the bee farmers, majority of bee farmers across the world use wooden hives. So I mean, if poly was that much better, I think all the bee farmers would have cottoned on to that and used poly. They don't. They use wood. I think the reason they do that is because it's far more durable, especially a commercial operation. So what else do I like about poly? I liked that they were cheap, and when I was setting up and starting, I mean, I wasn't buying pallets worth of hives. I was buying maybe 5, 10 hives at a time, and I was buying it from the kind of regular manufacturers. And when you look at the difference between wood and poly, just buying a single hive, the poly was cheaper, especially for certain manufacturers as well. And if you get them at the right time of the year, get them in the sales, it tends to work out cheaper. I'd say that's probably not the case anymore. Um, I'd say for the general public, I'd say it's 50/50. I don't think either of them have a competitive advantage over the other. If you look at some of the seconds, wooden seconds in the sales— and I'd always recommend going for a seconds quality wooden hive— they're just as cheap. There's really nothing in it, if not maybe a little bit cheaper. So I'm going to scrap the idea that poly is cheaper than wood. Because I don't think it is anymore. So what else do I like about poly? Now, it's nowhere near as durable as wood, and I'd go as far as to say that's one of the negatives of poly, is that it's not anywhere near as durable. But it is still quite durable. It's easy to repair. You can repair holes and nicks with wood filler, exterior-grade wood filler. That works really, really well. So I mean, you can repair it if it shears off at both ends. But yeah, you do get a little bit more wear and tear on poly, especially when you're kind of levering up boxes against wood. So that's about it, that's pretty much everything I like about poly. Let's move on to some of the things that I don't like about poly. So as we said, first thing, durability. It's not as durable as wood. You will dent it, you will bump it, but you can repair that quite easily, apart from some of the boxes where they have little shallow bits and little thin rims, and then if the bees start eating away at them, then you'll in real trouble with that. So I don't like that. Right, what else I don't like about poly? I don't think they're as, as a sustainable option as wood. I think wood is the more sustainable option, um, and I don't like the fact that it is a plastic-derived product. So there's no getting away from it— polystyrene, plastic-derived— and it's not as green as a wooden product. However, it is a fully recyclable product. I've been in contact with 2 or 3 companies now, and they will take away Polyhives, and they'll recycle them to make new polystyrene products. The technology didn't used to be there or so widely available, but it's really coming in now. Joining with the drive to recycle as much as we possibly can, these products are fully recyclable, and they will be recycled at the end of the use. So this one kind of sits in the middle as well. I mean, people say you get 30 years out of polyhives. I've got mine, and I've had some of these for five or six years. And they do look pretty much as good as new, so I think I will get the 30 years out of them. Maybe we won't get 30 years out of them, maybe we'll get 15 or 20 years out of them. I think the wooden hives will definitely last longer than poly hives. But I've got a plan, so at the end of the serviceable lifetime of all of my poly hives, I'm going to chop them up into sections, so they'll just be like square sections of poly, and then I'm going to line my bee room with them, or line a shed with them, or line something with them, and just use them as an insulation product. They're really, really good as an insulation product. They're basically like a Celotex, something like that. Excellent insulation values. And with a simple cut down the middle, because I don't use screws, you can just line a wall or line a shed or a cabin or something with these products, and then you'll get another 50, 60 years out of them. So the kind of whole life workings of my poly will be over 100 years. That's the plan anyway. And then obviously at the end of that life, they can be fully recycled if needed. So that's pretty much it. That covers what I like about wooden hives, what I don't like about wooden hives, what I like about poly hives, and what I don't like about poly hives. And if you had to ask me what is my favorite and which is best, I genuinely can't give you an answer. And I'm sorry for making you watch all the way through that video of me rattling on about which is best. I think it's personal preference. I think everyone is in a completely different situation and needs to make their choice based upon the information that's widely available to everyone. So for, say, a 75-year-old lady who wants a hive in the back of her garden and plans to keep bees for the next 10 years, go for a polyhive. But the polyhive is going to make your life so much easier because you're not going to have to do anywhere near as much heavy lifting. That characteristic on its own should give you the advantage because you're not going to do the heavy lifting and should give you all you need to know to go and buy the poly hive. If you're starting up a bee farming business and you're buying hundreds of, hundreds of hives, you can get the economies of scale, you can get the hives cheap. and you've got kind of 30 or 40 years ahead of you in the bee farming world, then go for wood. Like, I'd always say go for wood because it'd be the cheaper product and it's going to be more durable, and the benefits of poly are massively outweighed by those 2 things. So the durability and the cost. For me, I'll continue to use both, and I continue to use both based upon one simple factor, and that will be cost. So if someone comes along and says, I've got a really, really good deal on some poly hives, this is how much they cost, look how much cheaper they are than the wooden equivalent, then I'll go with the poly hives, assuming that they're compatible with my existing kit, and that's always the caveat that I put in place with poly hive purchases. And if someone comes across and says, here's 20 or 30 hives or a pallet of wooden hives, look at this amazing price, look at the quality of them, look at the wood, then I'll go with that option. It's an important note to make though, yeah, is that I'd say the quality control in poly is definitely better than wood in general. Like, you can get wooden hives made by— there's a chap down in Devon, I think, called Pete Little, Hive Maker, who makes beautiful, beautiful cedar hives, perfectly engineered, perfectly fit together. Cost a bit more than what you'd get from China, But you'd expect them to. But the Chinese ones, you know, when you see some of these, the fit is terrible. So just do a little bit of research when you're buying your wooden hive and don't assume that they're all similar. You'll get really, really good quality wooden hives that will probably cost a bit more, and you'll get really, really poor quality hives that cost a bit less. And then in the middle somewhere, you can find really good quality, really cheap hives as well, probably not made out of cedar. But yeah, you need to just kind of evaluate all of those. Whereas with the poly, generally if you're buying an Abello poly box, it's always going to be the same. They've got the quality control places in place, there's really not going to be a huge amount of fluctuation. And even between the different manufacturers, I mean, I've got my complaints about the compatibility between manufacturers, but even between them, the quality is all pretty much there. Like, I'd use any poly hive on the market and they do a really, really good job. I personally wouldn't use a couple of manufacturers Only because I don't want to have to kind of have to start putting like rims in place to match them up to the boxes that I've already got. That's the only reason that I wouldn't use them personally. So I'm sorry if that seems like a complete cop-out, and like if you want to read into which one you think I prefer, just kind of have a look around. I mean, I've got a lot of polyhives and I really like my polyhives, and I don't know if I'd swap them. I think I'd keep everything that I have if someone came along and said, I can swap all my poly hives for wood overnight. I don't think I would. I love the fact that I can move them around so easily, and I love the fact that they're light. I'm yet to be convinced on how long they're going to last, but you know, I wouldn't swap them out. But I'd definitely use both going forward, and I just advise you just to think about your circumstances if you want to get a poly hive or a wooden hive. So I'm not going to say to you wood is best, go and get wood, and I'm not going to say poly is best, go and get poly. Just take a look at all of your circumstances, take a look at the pros and cons of both, and work out which hive is best for you. And that's going to be the best hive. That's what's going to be the best hive between poly and wood, the one that makes the most sense for you as a beekeeper. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. I've been meaning to do this one for ages, and it was only when someone gave me a nudge on Patreon to say what's best, poly or wood, and I kind of gave them the same answer as well and said, you know what I mean, it's either is as clear-cut as that. I'm not going to say which one is best. I'll do a video for you outlining why I think wood is good, wood is bad, poly is good, poly is bad, and then you make a decision to fit your own circumstances. So I hope you've enjoyed the video. 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.