Why Are Poly Nucs So Expensive

In this video, I'm going to talk to you about the price of poly nucs and why the price is just getting out of control. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. I had the fright of my life earlier this week when I was looking into the price of buying a pallet's worth of poly nucs. It came back quite a lot more than I expected it to come back at. It was extortionate. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about my experience with poly nucs, how much the price has gone up over the recent years, and if I think they're a viable solution going forward. So first off, poly nuc viability in terms of an actual product. I love poly nucs. Not talking about bees in a poly nuc here, just talking about the box. It is the most versatile piece of kit, and it's the piece of kit that every single beekeeper I think needs to have in their arsenal. I used to love buying poly nucs. You could buy a pallet of poly nucs, you could even buy one or two poly nucs, and you would get them for around the £20 to £25 mark. In this video, I'm going to use Maysmoor for my example because I've been able to go back and do a little bit of benchmarking, look at their prices and how their pricing has evolved over the years. And this is by no means a stab, and I'm not singling out Maysmoor at all. This is across all of the poly markets. The prices are going up at a rate of knots, difficult for consumers to keep up with them. I'm gonna talk about those factors in this video though, but I'm using Maysmoor though as an example just to show you and evidence how that price rise has escalated over the past few years. So I remember when I started out beekeeping, you could buy a poly nuc for around £20. Got it in the sales, you could get it for around £20. Going back through the Maysmoor poly sales, which is where I used to get all of my poly nucs 'cause they were really good poly nucs, and they were really cheap as well. 2016, 2017, they had a sale on and you could buy a 6-frame Polynuc with the base, with the feeder, with the roof, and it was £25.20 including the VAT. You fast forward 12 months to 2018 and the price of the exact same Polynuc was £25.20 including the VAT. So there was no increase. And I thought, this is great, like they're not increasing the price of this, they're keeping it relatively stable. Things are good. You fast forward to 2019, and they put the price up a little bit. So it went up to £26.80. It's about a £1.50 increase, about a 5% increase. I think you can live with that 5% increase. Obviously things go up. We have inflation. Things don't stay the same price the whole time. So little bit of a price increase. So 2017, 2018, 2019, the prices have gone up. So you go forward to 2020, the price has gone up to around £32.50. So that's a big jump. That's gone up by £6. It's around 25% increase. So I'm thinking at this point, wow, Polynooks are getting really, really expensive. But luckily we've been through the worst of it. We've got that big 20% increase out the way. £32.50, I can still afford that. Anything around that mark, not too bad. You come into 2021 and the next sale, it went up to £45. So I just couldn't believe it when that price increase came along. But I kind of thought again, okay, we're getting through some real hefty price increases here. Surely this is going to stop somewhere. £45, grab it in the sale, take the VAT off, probably can live with that. Now we're still in 2021. Now I'm doing this video, you go on to Maisemore and okay, it's not in the sale at the moment. The price of a single poly nuke, exactly the same poly nuke, okay, it's got a slightly deeper roof, is now £50. £5. The cost increase of these polynucs, I just can't believe how quickly the price is increasing on them. And you speak to the manufacturers, you speak to Maysmore, you speak to Paynes, BS Honeybees, Abello as well, and it doesn't seem that the end is in sight and that there's going to be further and further increases coming up. Now you might ask what's driving those increases, and you look at the strength of the pound in comparison to what it was like in 2016, 2017, 2018 It's not really that much difference. Might have gone down like a little bit. Maybe you can attribute 10% of that cost to fluctuations in the pound. The big one at the moment that's really hurting us is the energy increase. Making poly, it's quite energy intensive. They're passing that cost on because the cost of gas is very, very expensive. The actual raw material cost of the EPS has gone up a bit, but it's really not gone up that much. So I have to say, looking at all of the market forces, I don't see why the price of poly is going up so much faster than everything else. And we're in a scenario here where the price of everything is going up. You look at wooden hives, plastic hives, poly hives, stainless steel machinery— like, everything is going up at a rate of knots. But I've singled out the poly hive just to show you how much that has increased over time. Go back 4 years, it was £25.20, and you look at it now, it's £55. So it's over 100% increase, probably about 120% increase over 5 years. And I think it's getting to the point where a lot of beekeepers are thinking this might not be an economic way of creating nucs for sale. We're certainly looking at that at the moment and thinking, I don't think we can continue putting bees into the nucs, sending them out to people, and including the nucleus in that sale, the actual box. And it's a real shame that we're probably going to have to stop doing that because I like to give the beginners the actual box because when they transfer it over into their beehive, I think actually having that poly box to go alongside is really helpful in terms of making splits and doing all your normal swarm management. It's a really useful tool for people to have, but I think a lot of people are going to end up having to transition over to Correx boxes for transporting things around and just making an investment in the poly nucs and just keeping them. And maintaining them is something that we're not really used to in terms of actually not using them as not a disposable item because you're sending them on, you're recycling them, giving to someone else, but actually doing some form of maintenance on them year on year just to make sure that you've got an asset that you can use kind of for 10, 20, 30 years if you can get that much time out of it. So I just wanted to do that video because it's like an interesting observation for me. Like, I look at the price of poly products all the way and I'm always noticing the price increases And I'm just thinking, when will this price increase stop? Speak to the manufacturers and they say it's not going to stop anytime soon, but it's definitely going to come to a point where consumers and businesses like me say, that's too much, I can't afford to do that anymore. And it'd be interesting to see where that comes and what happens when you reach that point. Will the price of poly go back down? I don't think it will. I know stockists, they don't like to put price of things down. But it'd be interesting to see how people vote. And the way that people vote on that is they vote with their money. So if the price goes up to X amount and people say, that's just too much for me, I can't afford that, or it doesn't warrant the benefit that I'm going to get out of that product, then I'm no longer going to buy it. You look at some of the different prices across some of the different poly hives. You've got the Abello Poly Nuc that's very, very expensive. That sits at around £68. Slightly different and a bit of an outlier in this argument though, because it is a different manufacturing method and it's a slightly different design of poly as well. Still, £68 for a nuc, very expensive. The BS Honeybees one, the price is going up as we speak, so by the time this video comes out, probably after Christmas, it's going to be £59, which I've had confirmed, including VAT. The Maysmore one's £55 including VAT, and then Paynes are a little bit cheaper than that as well. So Paynes are definitely the cheapest option on the market at the time being, and it's the one that I kind of don't really like because I don't like the side feeder. But it's fine, it still works, and you do really need to make that decision now. You can't pick and choose and say, I'm going to go for the best option for my money. you need to say, right, what is the best option for my money here? I need to cut a few corners and save a few pennies, because buying a pallet used to be able to get for £1,000. Now you're buying a pallet, it's going to cost you probably £2,000. So I'll be interested to hear kind of all of your thoughts on that as well. Maybe people don't realize if you've only been beekeeping a couple of years, like, how quickly the cost of poly products is accelerating. Do you think it's going to stop here? Do the current prices put you off? Stick it in the comments below, because I do— I like a conversation about bee equipment. Pricing. And I guess the next thing that's going to come from this is, is poly going to become unfashionable because it's so expensive? Like, I remember the conversations that I always had with people when I was getting into beekeeping around 2015, 2016, buying a lot of kit. You had this whole polystyrene versus wood debate, and always the biggest benefit of polystyrene was its insulation properties— main reason that I bought it— but also it was so much cheaper than wood. Like, it really was. To buy a wooden hive, you're probably going to save 30 or 40% buying the polystyrene equivalent. And now we're in a position where even in polynucs, they're pretty much like for like, which is crazy. Like, it really is. Over 3 or 4 years, to see it come that far is quite, quite astounding. So what I think it means is that it opens up a new place in the market for something else to come along and fill that void. Will it be plastic, some sort of expanded plastic, Will it be something that you can fill yourself? I've seen some polyurethane ones where you fill it yourself. I would love to see, and I would love to get involved in designing, some sort of outer shell of a beehive that's cheap to make, and then you fill it up with something recyclable. Love to see something like that. They do some sort of crisp packet bottle bricks. I don't know if you've ever seen those, which is you take a bottle and you stuff loads of crisp packets in it till it's really, really solid. Gives you a brick and then you can build stuff out of the bricks. So very thermally efficient and really good in terms of sustainability as well. I would love to see someone come up with a solution in terms of a beehive to do that. If you come up with it on the back of this video, I do expect a 2% commission, so drop that in the comment as well. But we throw so much stuff away and also we have so much of this expanded polystyrene that goes into landfill potentially that we could grind it up and we could put it inside a beehive, use that as the insulation. It would bring the cost right down, and it would mean that it is recycling something that would maybe go into landfill as well. So that's just a little bit of a comment for the future. Maybe the price increase in poly is going to drive our choices and our design choices for future beehives. I hope you enjoyed that video though. I hope the price increases aren't putting you off beekeeping. 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. Bye.