Ike

Check the replacement filter price and availability in your city before you commit to a brand, not after. I bought a unit on a good discount and then found the filters were import-only, three weeks of shipping, and cost close to a third of the machine each time. The boring locally-serviced brand you have never heard of on a review site is often the correct answer for exactly this reason.

Two portables, three years, and the thing that wore me down was not the noise, it was the maintenance surface area. Two coils to clean, two buckets or two hoses, two units to lug up stairs in October, two things that fail in different ways. Whether that is worth USD 2,100 to you is a personal question but it is the actual trade rather than the pint ratings.

Packability answer, since that is your actual constraint: the wrap styles compress into a small pouch that clips on, which the horseshoes do not. If you are choosing between two things that both half-work, choose the one that does not eat your bag.

It is the single most common reason new beekeepers think they are failing. Ask anyone at the club what their package did in year one and the tone changes.

Your job for the rest of the season is weight and mites, not honey. Get them to overwintering weight, do a mite count in August, and next spring they will explode out of the box in a way that makes this year look silly.

I own three and regret two. The one I would buy again is a plain box with a big filter and a dumb dial. The two regrets were both app-controlled with a sealed proprietary cartridge, and the replacements are close to a third of the purchase price every year, which nobody puts on the box. Before you spend GBP 250, price two years of filters for whatever you are looking at and then decide.

Before you buy anything, work out where the water is coming from. Mine dropped from 68% to 54% with no new equipment after I extended two downspouts away from the wall and stopped drying laundry down there. A dehumidifier is a bucket under a leak; it works, but it works forever, at 400 to 600 watts, and you pay for that every month.

It is plastic foundation. So it might just be that they dislike it?

Politely disagreeing with the whole premise. If the café is good and 200 metres away, you are not buying coffee, you are buying twenty minutes out of your flat, and a machine does not replace that. I bought one under the same reasoning, used it for five months, and sold it at a loss. The people for whom home espresso works are usually the ones without a good café nearby.

Neither matters as much as weight and mite load. A heavy, low-mite colony survives minus 20 unwrapped in an open field; a light one with mites dies in a wrapped hive at minus 5. Heft the back of that hive before you spend a weekend on carpentry.

Nine per 300 is three percent, and in August, going into the period when winter bees are being reared, that is treatment territory by any threshold I have seen. The bees that will carry the colony through winter are being raised right now, and mites feeding on those specific larvae is what kills hives in February, not the cold. Pull the supers if you want honey for yourself, then treat. With daytime highs of 28C a lot of the organic acid options are outside their temperature window, so read the label for the product you can actually get, because that window is not advice, it is the difference between a treated hive and a dead queen.

Yes, and be generous. Whatever your local overwintering weight is, hit it before you take a frame for yourself. A colony you treated but starved is the same dead hive with a different story.

Three weeks of leaving them alone is the hard part and it is where most people ruin it. A virgin needs about a week to mature, a few days of decent weather to mate, and then a few days to start laying. Every inspection in that window risks her getting balled or lost on a mating flight because you opened the box at the wrong hour. Mark the date on your calendar and do not touch it.