Hey yall, added our super and we see hive beetles through the looking glass. What is the best way to deal with them at this point?
Hi Erin, hive beetles are fairly bad where I live. The only thing I do to combat them is to keep all my brood frames with a high percentage of worker comb. That way, I’m keeping the drone population down, with the worker population up. Workers will chase them incessantly, & thus wont allow them to lay eggs. Drones, on the other hand will allow them to do what they want. Therefore we need to rid our brood boxes of large clusters of drones. Small clusters mixed with workers will be fine.
We also need to eliminate large honey spills onto the brood, as well as damage to brood & dead bees that can’t be easily removed by house bees.
Hey Erin,
Let’s get back to basics. SHB are opportunists that take advantage of bees that can’t defend the space. Therefore, the key to controlling beetle populations is to make sure you have a strong, healthy colony with plenty of bees filling the boxes.
Common reasons for SHB to get out of control include:
- Weak colony due to disease or other pest(varroa)
- Local area explosion of SHB numbers due to favourable conditions(collapsing unmanaged hives, warm weather)
- Too much space for the colony to defend.
I’ve seen more slime outs with beekeepers of less than two years experience due to them adding supers too soon, than any other cause.
Before adding a super, check the bee population. Are the frames covered with bees, even over the top bars? Are there multiple frames of capped worker brood, which will soon be adding to the workforce? Is there a strong nectar flow on, or about to be?
There’s also a type of super decision to make. Is the super for us or for the bees? If it’s for us, there must be plenty of time in the season for the bees to replenish stores before winter after we extract. If it’s the tail end of the season, the priority is to ensure that the bees can store enough for winter. In this case, I prefer to use an ideal or two that I reserve for the bees. Some people leave the Flow super on for the winter, but that can have risks such as honey crystallising making it difficult to extract next season.
If all the conditions are good for adding supers, you can help the bees by adding any of the SHB traps on the market. I use the “Silver Bullet” with diatomaceous earth placed in between frames in the super and brood boxes. Search the forum for other options.
If conditions aren’t good, no or low flow, not enough bees etc, remove the super and wait for the right time.
I see you’re in Texas, Erin. Not my area, but I would think the bees will be preparing for winter. I would be ensuring they have at least an ideal filled in time, even if you need to feed them to get there.
Cheers,
Mike
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