The original Apidea hive, made from brown dense polystyrene with 2cm thick walls, is easily transportable and simple to clean.
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Includes:
- Three plastic frames
- Removable feeder
- Transparent cover board with hole for roller cage
- Queen excluder
- Entrance slide
- Full instructions
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You can also purchase additional supers/broods and frames as needed.
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Daniel Basterfield, who holds a NDB (National Diploma in Beekeeping), has written a book where he talks about tips and techniques developed through his hands-on experience with the Apidea mating hive.
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You can purchase the book along with the Apidea mating hive for the special price of £50.
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Read Dan's brief overview of "Using Apideas" below...
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Queen raising is one of those beekeeping tasks that is easy to do on a small scale – say, 2 or 3 new queens in an apiary of a dozen colonies – but becomes increasingly demanding as numbers increase. The major issue is neither timing nor complexity, since queen raising tends to be a series of small tasks readily repeated, but rather the expense (to other colonies) of setting up increasing numbers of mating nucs. The timetable of queen raising is set by the bees’ biology, rather than by the beekeeper, and the crunch always comes when there are a number of ‘ripe’ queen cells (about to emerge in the next day or so) requiring that same number of mating nucs to be made up. Taking even just 3 frames of brood, food, and bees out of a strong colony for a minimalist mating nuc is do-able on a small scale, but multiply this by 12 or 24 mating nucs needed at the same time and you’d need to be completely tearing down several strong colonies.
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The idea of the mini mating nuc arose to address this, and as with most ideas in beekeeping is older than you might think, and periodically rediscovered or redesigned. A mini mating nuc is much smaller than a conventional nucleus hive, doesn’t use standard frames, and takes far fewer resources out of a donor colony in order to establish. Within this broad category are a number of designs, usually in polystyrene, ranging from all-in-one shoeboxes up to half-scale modular hives – the latter complete with stackable brood/super boxes, feeders, and so on. Both ends of the spectrum come with compromises, none are perfect. However I am confident that one design has most of the positives with few of the negatives, and that is the Apidea. Tellingly, this is also the most copied and imitated of the designs.
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The Apidea is a small polystyrene mating nuc that comes with three tiny frames and has an inbuilt feeder compartment. To establish it, you must add about 300g of fondant, a cupful of bees, and a ripe queen cell. In practice this means that you can easily stock a dozen Apideas with bees from one strong colony, and you wouldn’t notice any detriment to that colony at the next inspection.
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The job of this little colony is now to host the young queen as she takes her mating flights. Once the queen has come into lay, move her onwards to a larger colony within a week or so. Where the true utility of the Apidea comes in is that you can remove a newly laying queen and then give that same Apidea colony another ripe queen cell – they can repeat the process and host another young queen, giving you a second mated queen, and then possibly a third… if all goes well!
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Since queen raising takes place in the busiest part of the season, the most productive approach is to attempt to raise small batches of queens, repeatedly. Don’t try to raise 24 queens in one go, raise four successive batches of six. This eases the logistics and the bottlenecks, spreading the work in smaller peaks over more weeks. Do remember as you venture into queen raising, or try a different approach, that there are inherent losses at each step of the process. End-to-end, from cell starting to queen introduction, an initial success rate of 50% is good going. Persevere and it will improve!
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Having worked with most of the types of mini mating nucs, the Apidea stands out as being thoughtfully designed up to a level of function, rather than down to a target cost – nice touches abound that make the Apidea easier and more satisfying to use than other designs.
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What of the economics of all this? An Apidea currently costs around £30, or put in relative terms: less than the price of a decent local queen. Once an Apidea has successfully produced just one mated queen, it has paid for itself; produce more than one, and you are “in profit” (beekeeper maths!). Provided they are painted to protect from UV damage, Apideas will last for decades if handled carefully. We still have some of our original ones, purchased in the early 1980’s, that were retired in 2015 after thirty years of use.
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Much of my affection for the Apidea stems from the fact that that I greatly enjoy queen raising. Indeed the reciprocal is also true: much of my fondness for queen raising comes from the enjoyment of using Apideas. They really are so well designed for their intended purpose. Stocking the first Apideas of each season with bees and queen cells is a most welcome milestone in the beekeeping cycle, and a satisfying act of optimism. Of course every season works out differently, sometimes better, sometimes worse, but we beekeepers are nothing if not optimists.
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Dan Basterfield, NDB
April 2025
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