10F Langstroth Poly beehive Paradise®

01 · WHAT IS IN THE BOX

A complete hive minus the frames

What is not in there: the frames, any shallow super — both boxes are brood depth — and the floor tray. The 10 litre top feeder is optional, and worth thinking about from the start: there is no headroom above the frames for feed bags, so if that is how you feed, the feeder stops being optional.

02 · IT HAS TO BE PAINTED

Outside only, and with the right paint

Polystyrene does not rot and does not take up moisture, but the sun does attack it: a coat of paint is not cosmetic, it is what makes the box last decades. And the choice of product matters.

And a warning that rarely gets written down anywhere: paint the outside only. Leave the inside bare — the bees end up coating it in propolis anyway, and paint there does nothing.

03 · THE FLOOR AND THE STRAP

Open underneath and not fixed to the box

The floor is screened and completely open: varroa that drops goes through the mesh and out of the hive, which is exactly the point. The practical consequence is that there is no tray, so as it arrives you cannot close the floor or run a drop count on a board. It is worth knowing beforehand, because it is what surprises people most when the box is opened. The floor also rests on the box without being anchored to it, and with four kilos of hive that calls for a strap or a stone from day one: any gust moves an assembly this light. It is not a fault of the model, it is the trade-off for lifting it with one hand.

04 · CLEANING AND DISINFECTION

Steam for the dirt, chemistry for the serious jobs

Soiled parts are cleaned by hand or with a steam generator, which is what most people use as routine. If disease has been through the hive, the boxes take caustic soda (NaOH), a dishwasher tablet dissolved in 5 litres of water or a livestock disinfectant such as Virkon® S, always following its own label. What is not worth assuming is that the material is immune: polystyrene stands up very well, but in areas with heavy wax moth pressure it can suffer damage too, so regular checking is still part of the deal.

05 · BEFORE YOU BUY

It takes standard Langstroth frames, wood or plastic. But the accessories that sit on the box — covers, feeders, floors — belong to the BeeBox system: the polystyrene wall is thicker than a wooden hive's and the external footprint does not match.