BeeMax Hive pros and cons

Has anyone here used the BeeMax hives? What are the pros and cons? And which do you like best now: foam or wood?
Thanks in advance.
New Guy, wanting to do it right about the first or second time.

I drop things like boxes sometimes. Boxes slide in the back of my truck. I'll stack supers and hive boxes 7-10 high on a good hive. I can scrap the heck out of the inside of the box to get them clean. I can burn the inside if necessary. (knock on wood) And the wood boxes seem to last 20-30 years if painted occassionally.
I don't use the "other" boxes myself, but I'm sure that the above comments may not be true when using other than wood.
Plastic was hot a few years ago, and now nobody wants them. Will the beemax hives follow the same???

A search on BeeMax brings up this:
http://www.beesource.com/ubb/Forum12/HTML/000084.html http://www.beesource.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000350.html

I have a couple of plastic, not foam, deep hive boxes. It seems to me that they facilitate mold growth because they don't "breathe". This is off of the hive, stored in the garage.

I wasn't asking for speculation, I was asking for actual user reports. Does it really help, from your experience?
New Guy

Thats whats great about open forums, you get a little of everything. Different opinions, comments, individual speculation, oh wait, you didn't want that.....Sorry. I hope my willingness to extend my thoughts to help were not that big of an inconvenience to you.

There are just under 1000 members of this forum and not one reply from an actual user of the equipment mentioned. Maybe this tells you something. Hmmm.....lets see, wood for hundreds of years, and not one of nearly 1000 members has any "beemax" stuff....getting the picture yet?

OK I have one I don`t have bees in it I use it for demo`s it is light weight dosen`t have sharp corners for school childern to bump into, I do know one BK that tried one laast winter and the bees died.
my 2cents.
Ed

>I do know one BK that tried one laast winter and the bees died.

Was there any indication of the cause? I think condensation would be one concern. Of course it could have been from mites, viruses etc.

Another issue is acceptance by the bees. I've heard of people who had them and the bees all marched out and clustered on the ground in front of them and then eventually absconded, but I have not had any personal experience. I also meet people who hate plastic foundation, but I've had very little problem with it and I like plastic foundation.

My partner had two set ups last year.
He forgot to add a couple of critical
pieces of hardware and the bee space was totally wrong.
As expected the bees burr comb'd everything tight and it was quite a mess cleaning it up.
We also used one of the nuc while catching
a swarm. The bees were very reluctant to go inside the polystyrene box but marched right in to a wooden replacement. My partner has them stacked in his barn this year. My vote has the NO column checked off!

I've used the styrofoam hives for 3 years now. Pro: (1)Defintely more brood in the spring compared to wooden hives (2) The boxes and frames do not get glued together with propolis!... Cons: (1) Fragile, I dropped one once and it broke in half... however a little bit of glue and you'd never know it was broken (2) You need a matching bottome board and top, you can't use the wood because of the different dimensions, you can however interchange wooden boxes with the styro ( ie you can add wooden honey supers on top of your styrofoam brood chambers)

Soooooo... When it comes right down to it the big difference between the two would be... more brood in the spring for the styrofoam but the wood is more universal and much more sturdy