It's Polish week on BEE-L? The Pulaski parade in NYC isn't until October,  
:-) Łysoń hives (and synthetic hives in general) are quite popular in  
Europe - http://lyson.com.pl/72-ule_styropianowe (scroll to the bottom to  
see the map of their distributors). Better Bee has signed as their US  
distributor a year ago - they manufacture a lot of sturdy extracting  
equipment. The appeal of the hives in Poland is primarily based on their  
thermal properties, which was discussed already in a different thread here  
about the temperature of a winter cluster depending on the amount of  
insulation of the cavity.

I don't have any working contacts in Poland, but lurking at the bee forums  
there one comes across frequent comments regarding the relative flimsiness  
of a typical US Langstroth hive. Perhaps European beekeepers in countries  
north of the Alps, but south of the UK are accustomed to providing their  
bees with better insulated hives. I've already mentioned here the  
so-called Warsaw hives, which are built from two layers of wood with a 4  
cm thick styrofoam in between. Would be interesting to hear more about it  
 from any beekeepers based in the belt from France through Germany to  
Central and Eastern Europe.

Giving my success the last 2 years overwintering colonies covered with the  
silly-named bee cozy, I'm considering switching to using the synthetic  
hives too. Last winter in NY we had 6 weeks of steady temperatures  
hovering in the 20's and 10's and all my hives that had the cozy came  
through swimmingly.

Przemek

P.S.
Łysoń - phonetically you can spell it as wy-son with the last n being soft  
as in the Italian gnocchi (g is always silent).


On Wed, 10 Feb 2016 12:29:34 -0500, Myrl Stone <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Better Bee is offering a synthetic hive component product line. Produced 
> by Lyson, I believe. Anyone inspect or have experience with said hive 
> components ?

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