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.