small hive beetles

[p51d]

Hi, I have a hive which I was worked up since the spring. A fellow beekeeper was nice enough to help with getting this started. The hive has some small hive beetles. I have see about 15 at one time and of course kill them with a hive tool.

How many beetles are too many beetles?
Use Guardstar to drench the ground in late October or November?

thanks

[Kurt Bower]

My personal opinion on SHB:

Small Hive Beetles are not a serious threat here in the Piedmont Triad area.
15 is certainly disturbing, and I think you did the right thing by killing them.
What is the threshold? Well I would simply watch to see that they do not become a problem. If you go into a hive and see masses of larvae detroying your comb then there is a problem.
Keep your colony strong and healthy and they will take care of them for you.

Kurt

[Wally's Angels]

I'm a little late on responding but for what it's worth here's our 2 cents. Taeler's hive was being over run with those little nasties and we would smash every one of them we could catch (which takes some doing!). Finally did lots of reading and decided to try making a trap out of a plastic sandwich container. We had read about it on a web page somewhere and can't remember where it was now. You just get one of those cheap little plastic sandwich containers with the lid..... take a soldering iron and bore holes every 3/4 in all the way around the bottom of it about 1/2 inch up from the floor of the container. Then pour a thin layer of mineral oil on the bottom and take a jar lid of some sort and put a nasty little mix of cider vinegar that you had chopped up some banana peel and sugar into a couple of days beforehand in there and set that lid in the center of the "trap". (sheesh, I hope that makes some kind of sense)

Anyway, we did that and took a piece of corrugated cardboard and slid into the bottom board for the shb to crawl into and changed that out every day.... we checked the plastic trap every week. I never in a million years would have believed how many beetles were in that hive if I hadn't seen it with my own two eyes everytime we changed the traps!!! We thought there were maybe a couple dozen in Taeler's hive but wanted to be as safe as we could.... we were getting at least that many out of her hive every few days!!! I think if you see more than 3 or 4 shb in the hive there are 10 times that many living in it.... but that's my own very paranoid opinion and not really worth much. Bottom line for us was that if we felt concerned about the beetles it was worth using the traps since they hurt nothing, cost so little and are fairly effortless.

We won't pour chemicals on the ground though..... ashes maybe, lime maybe, vinegar you betcha... but not toxic to everything that lives stuff.

Won't the beetles be dying off quite a bit now that the weather is cooling off??

[p51d]

I think I understand what you are saying so I will try to build something similar to try . Not really thrilled about putting chemicals around the hive and I did buy some Guardin the star but if this works it think the Guardstar will be saved for other uses.

Let me see if I got this, basically a small thin device that fits in the bee space or frame. The bottom contains mineral oil, there are small entry holes and "food" to attract them.

This sound correct?