Maybe small hive beetles

[East Texas Pine Rooter]

I went to check on my ferrel hive this past weekend i captured. the bees were gone, and lay dead on the plastic carboard i have the hive sitting on. i think the carboard will be useful to detect ants, and keeps the grass, and weed away from hive. Is this a good idea, or not? i took the smelly brood comb from the new hive body and through them on the ground. fire ants were present, removing the larva, i treated the ground with the once a year treatment in the granular form. i noticed these white grubs, mabe a 1/2-inch long scurrying out of the combs, while laying on the ground. i picked the smelly combs up and took them maybe fity yard from the hives, and discarded them in the woods. after reading about the small hive beetle, i'm going to get what's left of the comb and discard them in the trash in plastic bags. i thought about saving the combs for melting, but am not equipped to do it yet. Would you please comment on what i'm doing? do you think the larve was maybe SMALL HIVE BEETLE?

[Michael Bush]

http://www.ceris.purdue.edu/napis/pests/shb/imap/usaall.html

There have been none reported in Texas.

Probably wax moths larvae.

Small hive beetle larvae are spikey looking:
http://www.csl.gov.uk/science/organ/environ/bee/factsheets/SHB.pdf

Look on page six.

[Branman]

SHB larvae a few days after they hatch don't have the spikes yet and definitely aren't as fat as those in the picture. If you had what looked like small white sorta earthworm thingies(but with the larvae looking heads), it might be SHB larvae. I've seen the real small just hatched SHB larvae, but my girls must be throwing out the larvae when they get the size of whats in MB's link's picture.

[athiker]

Last year, the 3 hives we have in Rutherford Co. NC had SHB. We would kill a dozen or so everytime we went into the hives. We never did see the expected damage, but did notice that they seemed to be drawn to the hive top feeders (empty), that we had left on the hives. We'd kill all we spotted with the hive tool, which was pretty easy to do once they were in the empty feeders.

We were pretty much prepared to either use Chekmite-Plus, which we really didn't want to do, or just give up on those hives come this year. This spring when we went into the hives for the first inspection of the season, the small hive beatles were pretty much gone. I don't know why. They never did become the nightmare we thought they would be. Suppose the bees are handling the problem on their own?