Natural Beekeeping International Forum

[srdesantis]

Hello, my friend and I started our first bees ever in June. We built a top bar hive and have so far been loving the bees. We've added bars twice and the bees seem happy with the space provided. However, today we did our first full inspection (we've been mostly hands-off with the bees) and found two things of concern.

1. It looks like we have small hive beetles (based on some quick google research). Is there anything we can do short of using pesticides?
The SHBs seemed to be moving among the bees unmolested.

2. We have a lot of open comb. Some comb looks like it is capped for brood but our we couldn't identify any capped honey storage. Is that our lack of experience or is something going wrong?

I've got pictures but cannot post the urls since I'm so new here.

Thank you so much for the help!

[JGW07]

I'm going to answer this in reverse order. Have you gone through a prolonged dearth this summer? It's very possible that they haven't been able to build up any honey stores. Have you tried comparing pictures of honeycomb to brood comb to make sure you know the difference? It can be confusing for newbies. You will need to establish for sure if they have no honey, especially if you are in a dearth, because a colony can starve to death even in the middle of summer in such a situation.

As for small hive beetles, I used to have them bad here in Georgia, but I added this to my hives and have since eliminated them as an issue. http://imgur.com/a/3YTzK?

[srdesantis]

I think you're right. We're experiencing dearth. It's been extremely hot and dry here. Two months ago the bees were thriving (and getting crowded) but in the past few weeks we've had a population decline. We've started feeding them sugar syrup and they seem very happy with that.

I'll keep an eye on the hive beetles. There are only a few and they seem confined to the corners.

[Adriaan]

As a beekeeper from Belgium, I have (thankfully) no first hand experience with small hive beetle. Lets hope it stays that way.

I found this video to be informative, reassuring and also funny.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUkFcgf4f6Q

friendly greetings

Adriaan

[JGW07]

Great video! James Ellis is a real Georgia boy. Listening to him was like listening to my neighbor. Everything about him, from his accent to his sense of humor is pure Southern.

I've done a lot of research on small hive beetles and he covered it all pretty thoroughly. I disagree that it's not really a problem here, though. In the fall, when bee populations are reduced going into winter, the beetles can over run a hive. Fortunately, with the jar traps, that hasn't been a problem for me, but I do know others that have lost hives due to them.

[frazier]

I love those beetle traps, I'm going to fit them to my hives this winter. And I see no reason why they couldn't be adapted to the Langstroth hives that everyone else in the club uses.

[JGW07]

They have certainly taken care of the beetle problem for me. It's an easy system to add to a hive, as well as easy to check the bottles and change them out if needed. I also appreciate being able to feed them without opening the hive.