Until today, I had very few problems this season.
I keep a couple of hives at another guy's place, because he wants them for pollination for his market garden. He treats me great and plants clover all over the place. He built a new stand for my hives that was sort of tall.
I had one hive that was doing really great. Once it hit the equivalent of two deeps and four supers, on the tall stand, it was literally over my head. So, I just assumed that it could do no wrong. I also literally needed a ladder to remove the top boxes. Soooooo, I just stopped inspecting it about 6 weeks ago.
I went to pull the supers today, and, of course, it was nearly dead. A good portion of the supers had previously had brood in them. The surviving bees had kept wax moths out of the actual brood area (which lacked any brood).
However, wax moths had gotten into two supers of capped honey pretty bad. So what I have is capped honey that also has wax moth damage.
There is a third super that is mostly okay with a few spots of wax moth damage here and there.
Here are my questions:
1. On the two supers with significant wax moth damage, should I try to extract that and feed it to the bees? Or would it be just as easy to sit them out and let the bees do the work?
2. On the super with minor wax moth damage, I was thinking that I would use a spoon and scrape out the bad spots and extract the rest and keep the extracted honey separate from the rest to make sure it does not taste bad or have problems. Is that a bad idea?
3. What would you do with the still undamaged brood frames?
Thanks for your help.
I keep a couple of hives at another guy's place, because he wants them for pollination for his market garden. He treats me great and plants clover all over the place. He built a new stand for my hives that was sort of tall.
I had one hive that was doing really great. Once it hit the equivalent of two deeps and four supers, on the tall stand, it was literally over my head. So, I just assumed that it could do no wrong. I also literally needed a ladder to remove the top boxes. Soooooo, I just stopped inspecting it about 6 weeks ago.
I went to pull the supers today, and, of course, it was nearly dead. A good portion of the supers had previously had brood in them. The surviving bees had kept wax moths out of the actual brood area (which lacked any brood).
However, wax moths had gotten into two supers of capped honey pretty bad. So what I have is capped honey that also has wax moth damage.
There is a third super that is mostly okay with a few spots of wax moth damage here and there.
Here are my questions:
1. On the two supers with significant wax moth damage, should I try to extract that and feed it to the bees? Or would it be just as easy to sit them out and let the bees do the work?
2. On the super with minor wax moth damage, I was thinking that I would use a spoon and scrape out the bad spots and extract the rest and keep the extracted honey separate from the rest to make sure it does not taste bad or have problems. Is that a bad idea?
3. What would you do with the still undamaged brood frames?
Thanks for your help.
