I'm thinking bout buying me a Beemax starter kit along with another beemax hive from Dadant. Has anybody in here had experiance with BeeMax hives and is there any other websites who sell Beemax kits also?
I have one right now. I like it. It's light, easy to put together, The foam is very dense. It's not like a sytrofoam cooler.
Alot of people in Europe use something similar.
You can also buy them from betterbee : http://www.betterbee.com
They are probably about the same price, but shipping might make the difference for you on who you choose.
I just got started myself. I chose this hive with the plastic frames:
http://betterbee.com/products.asp?dept=220
I believe the one from Dadant is just a single brood chamber with no supers, so this may be a better deal in the long run. Betterbee also sells 'hive increase kits' and individual deeps and supers as well.
So far I really like it, although I have only had my bees a little over a week. I have read that some bees may be a little slow to go for the plastic frames, but I don't have enough experience to say for sure. In my casy, bees from a 4 frame nuc (that was completely filled before being placed in the hive) had built up some comb on the 2 adjacent frames during the first week.