Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I determined that a 2-10 frame medium hive was queenless after using Formic Pro. I went through it thoroughly, and although it was not strong, it was in good shape. On Sunday afternoon, I used the plywood piece that allows combining a 5 frame nuc into a 10 frame hive. The nuc had a marked, laying queen and some brood. I checked the combining this afternoon, and found a real mess upstairs. The bees had chewed through the newspaper and I did not see the queen in the nuc box. What I did see was massive numbers of SHB. There were not SHB larvae, but they had slimed the food stores and ruined the brood. I brushed all of the bees off of the nuc frames that I could and plunged the frames into a garbage can with water in it. I easily crushed over 100 SHB.

My hope is that the queen moved down into the mediums and is o.k. I'll probably check the hive Thursday afternoon.

I suspect what happened is that the bees in the hive chased the SHB and they moved up into the nuc to join what SHB were there. There weren't enough bees left in the nuc to cope with the influx of SHB that had been controlled by bees in the hive. Lesson learned.

Wow, what's most amazing is that this all would have happened in the span of just 48 hrs? Probably 24 hrs if you consider the time until they chewed through the newspaper...

By all accounts, it seems like everyone has had huge issues with SHBs this year! Definitely the worst I've dealt with. I'm really curious to hear any theories on why this is (mild winters, particular rain/weather conditions this spring/summer, or something else entirely).

I did break down and buy some of the baitable, reusable "beetle jails" this past week to try instead of my old cheap "beetle blasters".

The weather finally got stable enough to check for the queen; there is no sign of her. My next plan is to combine these bees into a queenright 10 frame by putting an empty medium on, putting only 1 frame up top, and shaking the queenless bees into that super. My hope is that if the queenright hive has a significant number of SHB, there will be enough bees to protect the 1 frame until I can get in and remove it and the mostly empty super. There are enough bees in the queenless hive to make the effort worthwhile even though it is not what I would call strong.