Whats The Best Stand For Bees - Hive Stands - Plastic Pallets - Beehive Stands

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to talk to you about hive stands, and I'm going to talk to you specifically about using plastic pallets as hive stands. So first thing to say is, if you enjoy this channel, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every single one of our videos. Do loads of videos, got about 120, 130 videos on the channel at the moment. We post an extra video every single week, so hit that bell, subscribe to the channel, and catch up with all our content. Right, so plastic pallets. Now, at Black Mountain Honey, we do not like single-use plastics. You've seen previous videos where we, we tried to eliminate single-use plastics from all of our packaging processes. We just try to kind of eliminate them wherever we possibly can. Now I'm doing a video showing how we're using plastic pallets, and that's a lot of plastic there, as hive stands. So I want to give you a little bit of an introduction as to why we think that's a sustainable choice. I'll talk to you a little bit about why they're really good as hive stands, and then I'll talk to you a little bit about how I got them and what I'm going to do with them once I've finished. So the first thing to say is there's a very big difference between single-use plastics, so for example, like cling film or something that you're going to use once and then just chuck in the bin and then it becomes a nuisance and it becomes a kind of pollutant and waste to the planet, and long-use plastics. So obviously these plastics that we use in the pallets are very long-use plastics. But a little bit of background about these pallets first. So in the pharmaceutical industry, They can't use wooden pallets in certain parts of the industry due to contamination, so they're required to use brand new virgin plastic pallets every single time they get a shipment come in. I don't know whether that's the right or wrong thing to do, but I appreciate kind of certain industries, and the pharmaceutical one is one you need to eliminate any contamination coming in. So you get these plastic pallets here that are made, they're made out of virgin plastic. And they're made specifically for that industry. Now once that company has kind of used them, so all they do is they get something delivered in on these pallets, they get a company to go in and they take them away. Now these companies, and it's the company that I bought these from, they recycle them in numerous ways. So if they've got ones in really, really tip-top condition, they sell them out to other people and they use them for kind of like shed bases, and there's all sorts of other uses you can use for plastic pallets. The ones that I get have got damage. So where the forklift picks them up, he smashes them and you get damage that's created on the plastic pallets. So they're not in perfect condition for people who want to maybe use shed bases, although they're probably fine still for shed bases. But they essentially become a waste product. So what this guy does with them, the ones that he can't sell, he takes them away, they shred them up, and it becomes like a recycled plastic pellet. That goes back into the plastic recycling system to make new single-use plastics or to make new plastic pallets. So what we've done is we've intercepted that and we've said, right, instead of that new plastic product being used once and going back into the kind of recycled plastic system, what we're going to do is we're going to take these products, plastic pallets, we're going to use them as hive stands. These will last for 30 or 40 years that they have They're so well built and strong. And then at the end of their usable life as a plastic hive stand, we'll recycle them. So they'll just go back into kind of the same production manufacturing process that they would have gone if I hadn't have intercepted them, and we'll get an extra 30 or 40 years use out of them, as opposed to having like maybe a week's use as a single pallet going into the pharmaceutical industry. So I just wanted to give you that background as to the difference between, you know what I mean, maybe a single-use plastic and something like this where we're not increasing a carbon footprint by any kind of additional manufacturing process. We're not creating additional waste because all we're doing is taking a recycled product and then putting it back into the exact same kind of process environment that it would have gone to anyway. And then what we're doing is we're reducing the overall carbon footprint of that product significantly by getting an additional 30 or 40 years life out of it using it as a hive stand. So that's the background. The next thing to say is wooden pallets are a nightmare. So I'm just going to show you one of my wooden pallets that's been in place for about 18 months. So it's really heavy, this pallet. This has been here about 18 months. The grass grows up around it, it gets wet, It gets soaking and it rots, and you can basically just start pulling it apart. You see, it doesn't take much at all, and within kind of 18 months, these, these rot and they break down and they become an absolute nightmare. If you're doing any kind of movement on them at all, your hives can risk falling over, and then what you need to do is you need to kind of continually replace them, and it's an absolute nightmare. I'm just trying to break this one again to show you, but they are completely rotten through. And I've got this across so many of my hives at the moment. They're all just on rotten pallets, and I thought I could do away with it by having kind of like stacking them up in twos or threes and just replacing the bottom one, but it's a huge amount of work. It really is a lot of work to do that. So I'm just moving fully over to these plastic pallets now, and I find them so So, so good. And the reason that I find them so good— there's a few reasons really. The main one really is they don't rot. They're going to last upwards of kind of 30 years, these plastic pallets. It doesn't matter that there's a bit of damage on them because all I'm using them for is to elevate a hive off the floor. I stack them 3 high, so for each hive stand I need 3 pallets. Now that might seem like a lot, but I'm moving over this year, So I used to have on a standard euro pallet, which I think is 1000mm by 1200mm, I used to be able to get 2 hives on. With these pallets, they're slightly bigger than the euro and you can comfortably fit 4 on them. So that's what I'm moving over to now, is I'm doing batches of 4 on 3 pallets. So for each 4 hives, I'm using 3 pallets and they cost me a fiver each. So a hive stand for 4 hives is costing me 15 quid. Which is literally nothing. Now I appreciate there's issues with putting them in clumps of 4, and people like to spread them out to reduce drift. I don't find those issues, and I think once you get kind of like a decent amount of hives, you need to come up with a solution where they're clumped together reasonably. And I think 4 to a pallet, no problem with that. You see it all across America. I mean, I follow a lot of the big kind of beekeepers on YouTube. This is what they do, 4 hives to a pallet. And away they go. So as you can see, they're really big solid pallets. They're very chunky. They're about 150mm high. So once you stack up 3, you get 450mm high, which is a real kind of standard height, I think, for a hive stand. So I know you can't see the base of that stack there. That's 3 pallets high. And you can see, I mean, this hive here, no bees in it, obviously. It is a standard floor, one of my standard underfloor entrances, 14 by 12 brood box, and then a feeder and a roof. And if I just start undoing it, drop in my standard inspection is kind of taking off the roof, taking off the feeder crown board, and then this for me is my standard inspection height. And as you can see, it's really nice for my back, like it's just the perfect height. Like if I put my hands like that, my knuckles kind of scrape the box. That's a really good kind of tip to get the brood box to the right height for you. You can adjust that up and down, but if you kind of just rest your knuckles on it, That's about the height you want to be working at. Any lower and you're going to kind of tilt that back down, which isn't good. Any higher and you're going to be straining up in your shoulders. So that's a really nice height to be working at, as you can see, right on my knuckles. And then, yeah, do you know what I mean? I can just kind of go through the hive. But yeah, do you know what I mean? I can just do it with a nice straight back. Obviously you're going to get a little bit of tilting in your back when you're doing inspections. You can't get away from that because the boxes are quite wide. But you just need to get it to the right height for you. So yeah, so that's the hive, that's what it looks like. And then obviously you can't see that very well on the camera there, but that's one on there. I can get the second one on there and then I can get 2 on the front as well. So what I do is I kind of orientate them all in 4 different directions. So I have a hive facing north, east, south, and west, and then I can kind of just rotate around, work from the side of each one, And it's a really, really nice easy system. Now another benefit of these plastic pallets is that they're really easy to strap up. So what I do in the winter, and I'm just going around and doing this at the moment, I go around, I take out all of my mite treatments. So I'm just going around taking out my Apivar strips at the moment. I then give my colonies my final feed and then I put them in this configuration. So you've got on 3 pallets and then with 4 hives on each. And obviously all of my hives, they've got separate ratchet straps on them. And those ratchet straps are good for holding the hive together, but it doesn't stop kind of stuff coming along and knocking it over or blowing it. So then what I do is I wrap a ratchet strap around that way, just 2 of them, which ratchets not only the 3 pallets together, but it ratchets the hives to the pallets as well. And it's amazing, like it gives you such excellent protection from winds. So if you're in a position where you've kind of got potential gales, this is Excellent. Any hurricanes, or maybe it won't kind of manage a hurricane, but if you need to protect it from wind, this is my standard kind of go-to in North Wales. And we get really strong winds, you know what I mean? We have kind of gusts up to 70 miles an hour here on a regular basis in winter. I wouldn't want to just kind of leave these unstrapped with no straps and bricks on them because I think with poly it can just blow off even with a brick on it. So I strap my hives and I strap them to the pallets as Now, in terms of hive stands, I've gone through so many different hive stands trying to find the answer to what I think is economically viable and kind of able to work at a good height for my back because my back's a bit bad. I'm not that fussed about them looking nice. So, I mean, they're kind of like the 3 key areas I think that you're looking for in a hive stand. Like, first ones, I built them myself, individual hive stands, and they were just so much hassle. They were hassle building them, they were hassle getting them level, they were made of wood, so they're basically rotten now. It was so much work and really not a huge amount of benefit. I then moved on to a different design of hive stand, one of those standard ones with splayed legs, and they're nice, and I think they look really nice, but again, if you buy them, they're expensive. If you make them, It's a lot of work to make them, and then they can still rot. Abello do really, really good hive stands. They're kind of made out of carbon steel, galvanised, so they will last pretty much forever. And then you run kind of tanalised timbers over them. They're really, really good, excellent amount of adjustment on them, but they're expensive. So for us, we just couldn't justify the cost of getting those, although I see a number of bee farmers using those now. So I think if they can get the cost to a reasonable level for those, that's a really nice idea. We then moved to wooden pallets and I thought, wow, this is it, wooden pallets, it's great. I can get as many wooden pallets as I ever need for free. I'm never ever going to have to worry about hive stands again. So we kind of probably like took 2 hives to a set of 3 pallets and we've got like 150 hives. So we're talking kind of like maybe 200 or 300 pallets that I've got over the last few years and they're around all of my apiaries at the moment and they're just falling to pieces. Absolutely rotten, fall into pieces. And people gave me this advice and I didn't listen to it because I just thought, well, they're cheap, I'll just— when they rot, I'll just swap them out. That was my thinking. Um, and it's too much work to go around and consistently swap them out, too much work to consistently go around and ask people for pallets and go and collect them, and they give them to you and then they're the wrong size and they don't match up, and some are bigger, some are smaller, some are thinner. It's just a nightmare. So I'm back to the drawing board, and I thought the whole time I had in the background, I thought plastic pallets is a really good idea. But A, I don't want to go and buy plastic pallets and kind of add that waste into the kind of earth. And B, the cost. I was looking at it and they were saying like 10 to 15 quid a pallet, and I was thinking, ah, that's annoying because I need 3 for each 2 hives. And then I found these and found the guy, do you know what I mean? He was selling them and he was open and honest and said they're damaged, but for what you need them for, they might work. I'll deliver them to you. That was even better, drop them straight to the apiary for £5 a pallet. So I bought 100 off him a couple of months ago, put them out into all the apiaries, built them up, and they're just superb. So I thought I'd do this video now, now that the lovely kind of autumn weather has kicked in in North Wales and it's really cold. I thought I'd get around to kind of sorting out some of these apiaries, sorting out the ones with the rotten pallets, And I'll do a video to show you the plastic pallets that I'm using and then to also give you a bit of background as to why I don't think this is a bad environmental choice. I think if you can get hold of damaged secondhand pallets that are going to be kind of stripped down and ground up to be reused as a recycled product, get in there before they're stripped down, use them for 20, 30, 40 years, and then put them back into the hard plastic recycling that you get in your local waste center And then they just go back into that chain anyway. It's a really sustainable, environmentally friendly choice. Now don't get me wrong, they don't look great. So if this is in your garden, this might not be the kind of nicest thing to have in your garden. And again, if you're only going to have like 1 or 2 hives on it, I suggest you probably just build yourself some, some nice looking kind of splayed out wooden stands. I think they look a lot better. And in terms of practicality, there's no difference whatsoever. I'm doing this purely because I haven't got the time to be going around each and every year swapping out rotten wooden pallets. So that's about it, just a quick video. Wanted to show you what I'm doing here at the apiary this time of year. This time of year is great because kind of all of the feeding's done now, all of my treatments are done, the bees are pretty much in quarantine now like the rest of us until Until kind of Christmas time when I'll do some oxalic treatments. I'll do some, I'll do some checks on them. I mean, I'll go around, I'll just give them a little kind of heft just to see how they're doing, make sure they've accessed the feed. That's always a good tip. Don't just feed them and think they're actually going to come up inside to the feeder. Make sure they're getting into it. If not, take it out. You can put a bit of hay in there. But yeah, it's a quiet time of year, so it's a really good time of year to go out, improve your apiary sites. And one of them is leveling it and sorting out my hive stands. Tends to be a big job for me, but I'm hoping once I've done this round, I'm pretty much done and I won't have to do it again year on year. So in some of the sites, what I've done as well is I just use the plastic as the base layer because I haven't got enough of these pallets yet to do it, but I probably will replace them all out in time. But what I've done is I've replaced the base layer pallet with a plastic one And then put 2 good ones on top of that. And then what that does obviously is it keeps all of the moisture away from the wood and it's going to slow down that kind of rotting process. So I think the, the pallets will still rot because they're out in the rain, but it won't be anywhere near as quick as if they're just left on wet grass. That seems to kill them in about 12 months. I really couldn't believe how quickly a pallet rotted when it was left in wet grass. I'm just looking at pallets over there now. They're just falling to bits, 12 months. So I'm hoping by doing that, putting the base layer pallet, plastic pallet down, and then putting a couple of wooden ones on top of it, I might get an extra 12 months, 24 months out of it. But the plan is definitely to do what I've done here, 3 plastic pallets, and I will use them for a very, very long time. I'm moving over to stationary sites now. I'm trying to get away from kind of any movement of my bees. It's going to probably impact my honey crop a little bit, but I just don't have the time to move them around. So I'm happy to invest the time in leveling and fencing off, putting in kind of fixed hive stands, because I'm not going to do so much moving. Now I've got— when I went to the heather this year, I took plastic pallets up there and I just put— when I did my migratory beekeeping, I just put them all on one pallet. So don't think that you need to kind of go away and put like 3 pallets down for 4 hives if you're going off to the heather or the oilseed rape. I mean, I just use one. They're not going to rot because they're plastic, and then I can kind of deal with stooping down a little bit for a short-term foraging activity. But when I'm doing it week in, week out, it can be a bit bad for my back. So I like to get them up a little bit more, do it kind of 3 high, get it up to the top of the brood box on your knuckle. That's a really good tip again for you, and then you shouldn't have as many issues with your back as you normally would do. So that's it for the video. I hope you've enjoyed this one. We're going to do plenty of videos like this kind of throughout the winter. Do you know what I mean? Just, just little tips and tricks as to things I'm doing differently. Obviously, we're not going to have as many videos as me going in seeing the bees. They'll come back around maybe April next year. Luckily though, I've stored loads of those away, so you'll see them drip-fed throughout the winter just to give you some bee action, which I know is what everyone's really interested in. So thanks for watching the video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.