Roof Top Hives With Small Hive Beetles

As sean burgess mentioned at september meeting spraying the area around your hives with a solution of water and salt about a handful of salt per 2 gallons of water helps kill off shb larva that go into the soil to pupate and emerge the next season.

Roof top hives with small hive beetles.

In order to understand why it s important to keep shb in check you have to really understand the devastation they can cause to a stressed weak hive. Small hive beetle was first detected in australia in 2002 in the hawkesbury and since then it s spread across australian honeybee populations wherever conditions are hot and humid in summer. To use it in a hive you should combine it with some honey and vegetable shortening and then dab a small amount on the frames and corners of your beehive boxes. The beetles will be drawn to the shortening and honey and killed by the wintergreen oil.

Hives in full sun tend to have fewer beetles overall. It obviously helps as a weed control too. You will notice very few if any pictures of small hive beetles in this post. This particular pest is number one on my hit list of pests.

The hive being in full sun on the roof probably has a lot more to do with controlling shb than anything else. The beetles fly into the hive and lay their eggs wherever they can in empty comb or sometimes capped brood that is unguarded. However there are tons of small hive beetles running around. The second hive worries me very much.

When i move a hive from the shaded apiary to the sun apiary the shb disappear withing 2 weeks. Today i m going to go over the 3 ways to control small hive beetle in your apiary. Studies have shown that the small hive beetle can smell a distressed hive up to 6 miles away so when you open the top of the hive and those pheromones get out the beetles are coming. Small packages can be sourced on mann lake.

One of my hives is thriving and appears very strong with lots of capped honey cells. Using dine a max towels to catch small hive beetles. It is very weak less than half the size of the other hive and has triple the amount of small hive beetles running amok. And between the three there is one that works best according to sciency nerd like information based on my own surmising.

The front two legs are used for climbing so i figured out how to stop them at the bottom board of the hive by simply placing a light gauge sheetmetal frame. The beetles are very good at hiding in corners and crevices within the hive to prevent being harassed by the bees. All about small hive beetle. Hive beetles left unchecked will either cause your colony to abscond or they will die as the beetles take over.

Wintergreen oil is the most commonly used oil against small hive beetles. Several trapped beetles in hawaii https youtu be 7cz3wckt. Before deciding on the super hydrophobic treatment i wanted to know more about the small hive beetles and learned that they have pads on the four hind legs to propel themselves forward.