Hi Jake, I fully understand. I went through a period where I was using foundationless frames. As you know, the bees will build more drone comb on empty frames. On two occasions within a short period of time I noticed SHB damage on two large sections of drone comb. Luckily the hives were strong enough to everwhelm the beetle damage & not allow it to continue. The beetle damage is very recognizable & can’t be mistaken for anything else. It was on the second occasion that the penny dropped, a light bulb moment. I started to think about how the drones don’t do any defending in the hive & how they hangout where they recently hatched. I realized that the beetle are able to crawl under the drones that are hanging out without getting chased to lay their eggs in the unhatched drones, hence the damage to the drone comb. After that day I’ve been cutting out any large sections of drone comb I find. At no point on this forum did I ever say “cut out all the drones” like some people say I said. My recommendation would be to have lots of small pockets of drone comb rather that one or two large areas of drone comb. That way you still have plenty of drones. All those small pockets of drone comb will have plenty of protection by worker bees from beetle damage. Shb is a major problem in my area as it probably is down your way. Anything we can do to stop them destroying our hives is worthwhile considering.
Hi Again Jake, you may have read my posts where I mention I look after some bees for an orchardist. I have a few videos about it. “My bees at the lychee farm”, “a long time dead beehive”, “my lychee barter”. They are rough titles of the videos. He started off with 15 hives, he finished up with 3 hives. His neighbor was looking after them with a view of keeping the honey. SHB was their primary concern. He asked me to take over his hives on the same terms. I bumped his hives up from 3 to 13 within 12 months without me bringing in any more bees or queens. He doesn’t need the other 2 hives. … I also get lots of passionfruit, lychees & more mangoes than we can eat in a year, that’s besides the point… For the first 12 months or more, every time I was at his bees he’d come up on his quad bike & ask me “any beetles”. My reply was kind of stock standard “yes, but they’re not doing any damage”. He stopped asking me that question. Now he might just say “hows the bees going”. He’s getting excellent pollination, which is all he wants & a bit of honey for his daughter.
Thanks, it is great to get some pointers on dealing with SHB. I will stick with my approach until it is a problem, I know a lot of beekeepers locally who don’t remove drone comb and haven’t had SHB issues. But it is great to have another tested method of controlling SHB if it becomes a problem for me. I only have one hive and it is close to my house so it is easy to keep an eye on things.
Hi JeffH
We gave up bees in 2002 prior to us moving and of course we never had trouble with the dreaded SHB. Thanks to the FlowHive we’ve decided we’d have bees again, my hive is not due till Xmas (we live close to Byron Bay as well) but i have started worrying about the SHB ever since i sent my money! Your answer above was very interesting and inspired this question: I am going to start with a nucleus hive, this means a small colony, so do you suggest we treat it as a ‘weak’ hive and therefore start with just a few frames and monitor the growth and add frames as we go? Or is it OK if we just have virgin foundation combs, which of course will be squeaky clean? Thank you very much for your thoughts. By the way, in his book Natural Beekeeping, *Ross Conrad agrees with you about parasites preferring to prey on drones and he advocates keeping the drone population down also. Cheers
Hi & thanks Elyane, no from my experience the beetle wont lay eggs in virgin foundation frames. People in this forum seem to be misreading my posts, I’m suggesting to remove the large areas of drone comb, not the small areas of drone comb. If there are lots of small areas of drone comb in the hive, you will get an even spread of drones mixed with workers throughout the brood area of the hive. It’s the large areas of drone comb that will give a large concentration of hatched drones in that area, leaving that area vulnerable to SHB being able to lay eggs due to a shortage of workers in that particular area. I’m saying that 5% drone comb on a brood frame would be sufficient. A lot of mine have up to 10% or slightly higher, that’s fine & as long as I keep the worker populations up, I’m not needing to use any traps. Good luck with your bees, bye for now:)
Thanks Jeff, i’ll let you know how i get on. Cheers
Elyane
Hi, Your welcome:)…
I’m in the Byron Bay area too, at Mullumbimby. My beekeeping experience is now 23 days total so I’m still very much a novice. I think my girls are getting in front of the beetles but there are plenty around.
My hive has 4 X 20mm diameter, screened ventilation holes in the top. Today I squished half a dozen SHB actually crawling around outside the ventilation holes. The mesh is flyscreen and the beetles were too big to have been chased out. I think they must be attracted by the bee aroma wafting out of the vents.
Exactly They also smell bee distress which attracts them - hence they attack struggling hives
G’day Bob, those mongrel things will get in any way they can. I saw an interesting video on youtube of a scientist in Texas doing a talk on SHB. He did quite an extensive study on them from what I gathered. A couple of things I picked up from the talk was apparently the tiny ones we see don’t really reproduce. He talks about numbers of beetle per gram or oz. I forget, probably gram. Anyway once the no. gets over a certain no.per gram or ounce, their ability to reproduce is greatly reduced. Also what I found interesting was the fact that the optimal temp of a healthy brood, say 93 or 94 degF is too hot for the beetle, they prefer 89degF. So once the bee population drops, & the colony can’t maintain the optimal temp for the brood, the temp gets down to the ideal temperature for the beetle. So you have a two prong thing happening. The temp gets down to the ideal temp for the beetle plus you don’t have the worker numbers to stop the beetle from laying their eggs. So it’s party time for the beetle.
Thanks Jeff, The beetles have been much less active the last two times I checked. I’ve repositioned the Apithor trap so it’s in the optimal position and I have the three AJ traps located over the brood in the centre of the colony. They are where the bees are clustering. The entrance to the Apithor trap is almost directly under the centre of the cluster. I just blindly followed the Apithor instuctions so I guess whoever wrote them know what they were doing.
The screened bottom boards I’m building have flyscreen underneath so beetles can only enter through the front door where they run the gauntlet of the girls.
I didn’t install one in my prototype bottom board but I have beetle traps for the entrances of both of the 8 frame bottom boards I’m building now. They are kind of like cattle grids in miniature.
Have found a type of termy mesh, stainless and very small gauge as you would imagine, would using this on top of the Flow screen bottom prove any better?
The gaps in the mesh need to be big enough for the beetles to fall through and small enough to stop the bees going after them. A tray of vegetable oil terminates the beetles and would do the same with the bees if they got through. I bought a supply of ss mesh with 3mm gaps but it wasn’t cheap. Haven’t done the calculations but I’m guessing between $20 and $30 per screen.
What sort of dimensions in the termy mesh? I’m guessing the gaps might be about a mm, perhaps less.
after losing my colony and waiting for my new frames and bees to arrive today (Thank you Jeff) i have a new Beeletra trap ready… now this may seem obtuse but i do place it on the bottom then the screened floor of the flow hive and then the brood box…etc i assume the complete trap and tray should sit on the base so i can inspect the beetle trap every day, but do i remove the core flute slide screen board or does this stay in?
Yep, real tiny Mr.Science
Hi Jake,
Forgive me if this has already been answered, but what is the aperture of the base screen? I sealed the end of the ventilation opening, yet my bees are getting through the mesh and hanging on the underside of the mesh - this is going to prove troublesome as I have made a tray to slide under the mesh (as others have done) to catch beetles in either oil or diatomaceous earth. The tray has a system that seals the ventilation opening so bees can’t get into the underside of the hive, but seemingly they can just slip through the mesh.
Do I have to purchase different mesh to make it bee proof?
Are you sure the bees are not missing the entrance and congregating underneath the mesh instead of actually getting through it. That’s quite common and they can stay there getting fed for a long time.
If that happens you have to block off any way they can get underneath the hive from the front.
The mesh is #8 hardware cloth, which is 1/8 inch, or just over 3mm per square. That is too small for a bee to get through, so I think Dee is correct.
Thanks for your reply - it was my hope that they were just getting in some other way but twice now I’ve brushed them out, sealed off the ventilation opening (so the only way is through the mesh) and waited a day. Next day I find maybe about 50 or so hanging underneath and half a dozen dead ones on the floor. I don’t know how well they are getting fed because some are obviously not lasting very long and dying - seems like they are getting through somehow and able to get back into the brood box.
Seems like I’m going to have to take the brood box off the base and look for any holes that they may be getting through.
Would love to hear if anyone else has had this problem.
UPDATE -
Just checked the hive again now - more bees underneath (no dead ones, just some beetles), as soon as I opened up the entrance they angrily escaped (I don’t think they were happy with me!). I’m going to have to leave a space so they can leave from underneath the box. Honestly can’t see any other obvious opening big enough for a bee to get through - very frustrating. I’m guessing I’m going to find something when I pull the brood box off on the weekend.
Is there anyway you could take a set of photos all around your hive, focussing on the lower box/SBB join and post them here? Perhaps we can work out if there is a “leak” somewhere before you take the hive apart. Otherwise, it might be a good idea to take the box off and examine the screen - it may have torn or pulled away from the bottom board edges somewhere.