Hi -
Just been out to look at our hive. It’s about 4 months old, filled with a swarm but the colony is a small one. It seems we have some European Wasps in the hive. I can seen the crawling around in top of the excluder bewtween the brood box and the supers. The bees have not yet moved in to the supers. I saw a wasp enter the hive. The bees seem as active as ever. Would love some advice!
Hiya Otwaysgreen, welcome to the forum.
First of all if it is a small swarm colony and hasn’t built out the brood box remove the super until they have done that.
Then reduce the entrance to about 10-20mm.
This will help the bees to defend their hive.
I totally agree with @skeggley. Take the super off and remove the queen excluder too. The super should not go on until every frame has fully drawn comb and all frames are 80% full of brood or food stores, with every frame is well-covered in bees.
If your colony is very small, say only 4 frames of bees, I would consider reducing the entrance down to 2-3cm. The smaller it is, the more chance they have in fighting off the wasps.
One other thought. Once wasps find your hive, they mark it with an attractant pheromone which pulls in more wasps. It would be worth looking around the area near your hive to see if you can spot the wasp nest. It often isn’t that far away and is worth destroying to save your hive.