I'm a new bee keeper with one weak hive that I took over from someone else this summer, and have had some mild but steady hive beetle issues. I can't even really find the beetles themselves within the hive, other than occasionally spotting one, but I do catch larva on my slide out board beneath...

Checking my bees the other day and I noticed several dead SHBs on the landing board. I had not thought that they survived over winter as adults. I assumed that the larvae lived in the ground and each year a new crop appeared, but seeing these makes me wonder if adults pass the winter in the...

I have been watching the SHBs in my hives. My bees are very aggressive against them, chasing, biting, and sometimes even flying away with them. The beetles are usually corralled into a corner or hiding between frames. Thinking about their behavior, I figured they will crawl into any small...

Last year we got a few 3# packages from down south and installed them on frames from deadout hives. We anticipated that this approach (rather than starting them on foundation) would give the bees a head start on getting established. These packages unfortunately introduced us to small hive...

I can't help but think that the process of making packages from colonies down south will result in the inadvertent transfer of SHB with the package. Has anyone experienced this? Would it make sense to have some mesh large enough on one side of the package that the SHB will fall through and be...

What is everyones thought on dealing with small hive beetles? Ive seen that there are generally three ways of dealing with them and wanted to know whats best. I inspected my hive on Sunday and saw a one or two of them scurrying around on the bottom of a frame and wondered what I should do...

The Forgotten Space. Experienced Beeks are well aware about the importance of a Forgotten Space…the Bee Space. Too much Bee Space leads to Burr Comb, and too little space gives them an incentive to glue everything together. Either one of them makes it harder to work your hive. Bee Space is...

Three questions: 1) The small clump in the bottom middle, is it normal? I've seen a lot of them on the board, but never seen them clump like this. 2) You can see at least one bee bringing in orange pollen. Does anyone have a clue what might be blooming around here for them to bring that in...

I have a Freeman Bottom beetle trap that I've been using with pretty good success so far. What I find though, is that whatever liquid I put in tends to get pretty gross after just a short while. I've tried cooking oil, windshield cleaning fluid, RV antifreeze. Because of the design, the bees...

I have recently applied for a patent on a new method of protecting beehives from SHB. It uses a robber screen with powered electrodes around the outer edges. A protective cover provides a 1/8 inch gap over the electrodes, this keeps bees and people from touching the electrodes, but small hive...

Yesterday I was sitting and watching the bees fly in and out of my hives and I saw a SHB land on the front of the lower hive body right above the main entrance. This hive is by far my strongest hive and always has a full complement of bees on the front entrance. It was packed with bees and the...

I have a horrible time with SHB every time I set up mating nucs. I am seeing about an 80% fail rate. I really want to get this fixed before spring. My nucs are queen castle style with entrances on different sides. Help!

The question generally is can you feed old pollen to bees. Specifically: I have frames pulled from hives overtaken by small hive beetles. The frames were frozen to kill the SHB and now still have pollen and honey stores. 1. Is it OK to put these unthawed frames directly into a hive and let...

Hi All. I'm a new beekeeper with a small, struggling colony (long story). I have a top bar hive and am chemical free. Today I discovered a thorough infestation of what look to be hive beetle larvae and also some bigger ones that look like wax moth larvae (judging by pics on the internet). From...

Yes, I'm a new guy that lost 4/5 of a NUC last weekend due to overheating. I waiting 5 pain staking days to check on my bees. Unfortunately, my queen apparantely didn't make it as I didn't see her, didn't see new eggs or larva, and did see 5 queen cells. I've got about 1 - 1/2 frames of bees...

This evening I was watching my Top Bar Hive entrances and saw a beetle landing on the alighting board. A bee grabbed it and pulled in in the hive. Is that normal? The hive is a 7 week old top bar hive. It appears to be pretty strong, we have had great nectar and pollen since I installed it and...

I read a suggestion to use RV antifreeze in place of vegetable oil in SHB tray traps to drown them. The logic was the RV antifreeze is non toxic (to humans) and much cheaper. Does anyone have any other information on this. Non toxic to us doesn't necessarily mean the girls can stand...

Hi All, I am in Vermont, have 6 colonies, all thriving this year. Just checked them today and there are a few small larvae/caterpillar type worms on the top bars of some of the frames in two of the hives. I have never encountered them before. There are also some very small black droppings on...

The small hive beetles have arrived. I made an interesting observation the other day about a "mistake" I made when putting together my top bar hive, that may have actually ended up working to my advantage in battling these varmints. For the most part, I used a design that I found on Michael...

This is the first year that I have been able to rob my hives. While doing the crush and strain method, I found 1 SHB running around and killed it. The hive I pulled this from has a lot of girls sitting at the entrance daily, sometime bearding the hive. The heat has been down lately too. I said...