Hive Beetle

I recently discovered that my beehive had hive beetles in it. These pests are foreign to Australia and can eventually force the bees out of the hive. To remedy this I used two methods:

The first was to put black plastic underneath the hive. The beetle larvae need to bury themselves in the ground to complete their life cycle and this prevents them doing so.

Beehive inspection and feeding

I inspected the beehives on Tuesday the 10th of November but have been working on improving my website (I'll update it soon) so I only just got around to creating this post. The purpose of this inspection was to see how the bees were doing, put another frame of foundation in each hive, bringing the total to eight, pit a protein patty in the hive, and finally to put a feeder frame in each hive with 1 kilogram of sugar dissolved in 1.4 litres of water.

Hive inspection

I inspected my beehive last Thursday on the 5th of November, but only just got around to writing this post about it. I found quite a bit of honey stored in the outer frames and the queen had been laying brood in my new frames. I removed the two frames of sugar water which the bees had completely consumed, and then closed up the hive. I'm going to do another inspection this afternoon and give them some more sugar water, so I'll post some pictures up of the inside of the hive.

Bee Activity

I noticed a lot of activity around one of my beehives today - they were swarming all around the hive and crawling over the brood chamber. I posted some footage on youtube which you can see below:

First week nucleus colony inspection

I inspected both my beehives today and added an extra frame of foundation to each hive. The I found a lot of brood on the frames which indicated that the queen was laying well and there was also some honey stored. I removed two feeder frames which were now empty then closed up the beehives. I plan to give them some more sugar-water this Friday or maybe on the weekend. Below is the footage I filmed of my inspection:

Feeder frames

I inspected both my beehives today after leaving them alone for a week. All of the sugar water had been completely consumed by the bees and they had started to build a bit of wax in some areas on the outside of the frame. I only found a couple of dead bees at the bottom which most probably drowned so that meant that the pieces of wire I had inside the frames to help them out were more or less doing their job.

I plan to add some more sugar water on Friday to the beehives in order to help them grow in numbers.

Website available

I now have my website up and ready at startingabeehive.com.

A lot of information from this blog is now up there, and I will be adding heaps more as it is a continual work in progress. The website is to serve as a resource for anyone wanting to learn more about beekeeping, while this blog will act as a journal of my beekeeping experience.

I'm going to inspect my nucleus colonies this Sunday afternoon so I hope to have a new post and some video footage on youtube ready by that night.