Thursday, September 17, 2015

Bee Frame photos - Not what you want to see in a bee hive

I did a Ferrell Bee removal last week to discover that the conditions were unfortunately too gone to save.  1 of the things bee hives can get is small hive beetles.  These beetles originally are from Aftica and ended up in Florida I think in the 80's.  The beetles have spread to the southern states of the US.
             It's a bee keepers nightmare.  My nightmare was seeing the fly's on the outside of the Nuc Box bee hive I had the bees in.  Only to discover that the frames of bee comb I had transfered over had 50 to 75 percent small hive beetle larvae.  The larvae eats comb, nectar, honey and pollen and craps as it goes ruining everything and making it a huge slime goo mess.   This leaves a putrid odor too.  The bees won't go on the comb that is infested.  My Ferrell Bees were on the inside walls of the Nuc Box
             I ended up removing the frames to a temporary box.  Got my torch out and got as many bees as I could to fly away.  I torched the inside of the box.  This killed any larvae of the beetles and the adult beetles.  I then took the frames and walked quite a ways distance from the bee yard.  Not many bees were on the frames.  The bees flew off and I wrapped the bee frames and placed them in the freezer.  I froze them up until trash day today Thursday.  I don't even want to clean these frames up.  I can build more easily and have lots of wood to do this.  4 frames is about $.50 if I had to guess.  Commercially bought frames are about $4.50 Ea with shipping to your door.  You can see why most bee keepers just make frames.  Your only talking glue and nails if you have free wood. 

So I doubt I will ever bring back a Ferrell colony to the bee yard again with out quarantine procedure of 3 months.   It's a pain to have something happen to me like this.  Hopefully the other 2 bee hives don't get Hive beetles, but it's inevitable I think. 






3 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing your painful experience. It's a cheap lesson for the rest of us.

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  2. Thanks for sharing your painful experience. It's a cheap lesson for the rest of us.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Good to know. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete