APIDEA Mating Hive (Blue)

Description

This is the APIDEA mating hive, the little Swiss polystyrene nuc that has been the standard for raising and mating queens across Europe for decades. It is made by Apidea AG from hard polystyrene, so it is light, warm and stackable, and every part can be replaced on its own. It is what we learned on, a summer of them in our association’s queen rearing group, and it is what nearly everyone around us uses, so it is the one we have chosen for our own queen rearing.

What is in the box

• Hive body in blue, with removable sliding floor and front entrance slider
• 3 plastic top bar frames, supplied unassembled. They push together in a minute, and you fit your own wax starter strip along the top bar (no wax included)
• Removable in-hive feeder that holds about 500 g of fondant
• Transparent inner lid with a queen cage opening and cover flap
• Ventilation screen and excluders for the entrance and feeder

How we use them (our way, not the rulebook)

This is what has worked for us in County Antrim, learning alongside our association’s queen rearing group. Your bees, weather and forage will be different, so treat Apidea’s own instructions (linked below) as the authority and this as one beginner’s notes.

We fill each one with a cupful of young bees from a strong colony, give them a ripe queen cell or a virgin queen, and keep them shut in a cool dark place for three days so the bees settle before we open the entrance. For us that three day lockdown is the bit that matters. We lost our first two rounds of queens in a pair of cheap mini mating nucs by opening them too early and watching the nurse bees drift straight home, which is a big part of why we went looking for something better designed. Once the queen is mated and laying, the frames come out and she goes wherever she is needed.

Making more room

Three frames is enough to get a queen mated, but not much more, and a good queen will have them full within a fortnight of starting to lay. There are two easy ways to give her more space. The quick one is to lift out the in-hive feeder, which frees up room for two more frames (sold separately in our packs of five), taking the hive to five frames. You lose the feeder, so it suits a colony that is bringing in its own stores. The proper one is to stack up: the brood chamber super sits on top and adds another five frames, and the feeder super goes above that with about 1.2 kg of fondant. Set up like that, a queen can stay put for several weeks, laying properly, while you decide where she is going or wait for the right day to move her. It is also the setup that makes Apideas workable if you are out at work and cannot be checking them every few days. The outer cover has hollow compartments on the underside too, and some beekeepers pack those with fondant so the bees can reach it through the hole in the inner cover, a trick mostly used for overwintering.

Apidea publish a short leaflet covering set up, populating, introducing the queen, the three day confinement and cleaning. You can read it here: APIDEA Mating Hive instructions (PDF). One warning from it worth repeating: not every part will stand boiling water or acid when you clean them, so stick to warm water and a beekeeping-approved cleaner.

Size and delivery

24 cm x 15 cm x 17 cm. We post from County Antrim by Royal Mail, tracked, to Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. No customs paperwork or import charges for orders going south.

Read how we got on

We have written about our own queen rearing, warts and all: the NIHBS talk that started it, the queen that went up on a mating flight and did not come down, and what the Apidea inspection board was really telling us.