The Biggest Problem In Southern Beekeeping

welcome back to the 628 dirt rooster Channel where Harvey beekeeping is a way of life today I'm going to show you some small high Beetle treatment that I did combating a severe High Beetle problem that was killing hives and it was strong hives really strong hives I would break the hives open and there were so many small high beetles in there the adults and I made us I made this comment on another video that adults my high beetles wouldn't hurt a hive the bees would strong column he would run them out well uh caught me a liar whatever I got proved wrong because I lost two triple stack strong colonies to adult small high beetles this spring this well in the past week and uh back to Pure desperation I just started pulling out traps and throwing peppermints at them and doing anything I thought I could do to get rid of these small high beetles and I'll tell you later on in the video how that turned out and what worked for me today I'm adding beetle traps these are Beetle jails they got three compartments two for oil one for apple cider vinegar I've got to concentrate here just because it was the only thing I had little baby dropper from Dollar General cooking oil for the sides my son's pop open like this Center compartment like this apple cider vinegar in the center Center compartment and then snap it outside's closed these legs hang over the sides of it the frying top bar I think I have 50 in this bag and have another 100 in the house and I'm putting mints peppermints in all the boxes as well just pulling out all the stops because the Beetles are super super bad this year now to be fair I do not know if the peppermint method has any effect whatsoever there's been a few people that say it does not really a lot of people have done any long-term testing on it this is a method that he'll be the key for Earl started showing I tried it for a couple three or four weeks earlier in the year but didn't keep it up long enough to see any results or last year rather see a few High beetles crawled around in this one not many I'm almost expecting them to be drawing comb on the bottom of these frames this was a really heavy cut out that I did I ended up using two bee vacs to collect them all and I put newly waxed foundations in a little testy not bad overcast day forecast to rain in about an hour I'm about to pull these frames out and see what they've got drawn I'm 99 certain they've got all these frames drawn out and they may even have something built on the bottom because like I said it was a lot of these thankfully there's nothing on the bottom but I see a lot of a lot of work going on there getting stung in the stomach as we speak I'm looking good I do have a queen in here out of that cut out sour and rather than try to grab our sector up in the back because if I dropped her she was going down in the bottom of a wall where I couldn't get to it I thought about making a split off of this one today because I have some Queen cells but if she's laying really good I'm going to add some more new wax foundations let them build out and let them grow a little bit so I can get some more splits off of them she's laying this is all eggs and larvae all through here and they're starting to build a little bit on the bottom of the frame so I'm going to go ahead and add some more frames to this stack them out a little higher that bottom box has no frames in it because that's my dump box so I'll take this top box off and fill that bottom one up okay come here boy come on I got some Beetles for you come on if I had some plastic to Rattle he'd come over here oh yeah third frame in we're building drone comb oh and there's a queen cell dad coming it looks like an emergency cell all this is laid up though every bit of it has eggs and larvae in it so I wonder if something happened to the queen in the past couple days okay I don't know why they would be replacing the queen because let me see if there's an egg they're working it I know there's an egg in there gotta be can you see one because I can eat you I don't know they're working it awful hard and it's in a position of a an emergency cell so we're gonna I'm gonna stack it out and probably stick a couple of cells in here they're not acting queenless but I'm gonna go through the box I haven't I didn't see the queen she's been laying just like right up until at least the past couple days there's not even half the bees that I put in here from that cut out so I don't know where the rest of the bees went and if the Queen's gone I don't know where she went but obviously I have lost some bees somehow because I dumped a ton of bees in here uh back back basket and a half I had two egg baskets on the job fill one up and half of another one and again I've only had these in here for about a week just more here's more evidence of how new they are they don't they don't have anything propolised it's a brand new box it looks kind of old because it was sitting out the weather before I assembled it a brand new box no propolis on the frames brand new frames just gonna go through one more time see if I can't spot a queen if I can't I'm gonna go on them I have enough resources in here that I can make some kind of so-so splits which I don't like doing right now because the high beetles are so bad I need all the population I can get to fight them they're not bad in this box but some of my others are just terrible definite eggs and larvae in that frame there she is thank you she looks good she's working don't see anything wrong with her she is definitely laying these frames up real good this is on an Apple made bottom Acorn frames that we've over waxed I'm using the beetle jails they don't have to be full just one uh dropper is all I'm using they hang on the frames like this and I'm gonna hang it on a brood frame I like these better than those little black and clear traps that press down that the Beetles can hide under these are a lot nicer and they're reused reusable that's how that one's set up now full bottom moved a couple of the Drone frames down in the bottom checkerboard at a couple of new frames in the top this is facing west so that's the south side I've got a migratory type on and then a bottom board sitting on top of that just to block the Sun a little bit and since I don't have another half sitting right next to it in the South Wall I just prop something up I need to come up with something a little nicer to cover that South wall but I want to keep the direct sun off of them as much as I can I would cover south and west side if I could so out of desperation last night I put some of those soft peppermints these are the hard ones I put some of those soft ones in every Hive on the yard that have there I put two in it there's no evidence of that peppermint anywhere in that Hive so I so they took it all in last night I did not open it ahead of time to see what the beetle population was like before all I did was pop the lid and shove some of those soft they're easy to crumble so I just shoved them in between the frames I mean there's no evidence of crumbs or anything so that cell that they've got drawn is way more than since yesterday so it wasn't anything I did yesterday that caused me to build that out they don't have the numbers to be swarming or to be swarming uh they had drawn that one piece of drone comb off the bottom of that frame so I don't know what's going on with them they know their situation better than I do they know why they would or wouldn't keep that queen I'm going to leave her in there for right now and I'm Gonna Leave it a cell as well I'll come back and check them in three or four five days and see what that cell looks like see if the Queen's still in there I'm hoping they let her keep on going because she's laying real good she's got three frames laid up already and uh so I put oil trap and peppermint and I also have some stuff that I picked up at Dollar General yesterday or at Family Dollar Dollar General was out of peppermints but I'm telling you I was desperate so I picked up these if I couldn't find peppermints Family Dollar had peppermints though put that little dropper I'm using came out of one of these baby things at uh Family Dollar Dollar General and also picked up a new pack of Swiffer pads this is all I could find there these are uh odor defense I prefer the scent free but these probably will do just fine and we're gonna start putting some Swiffer pads not in that one I didn't see that it needed it it's got a beetle trap and and um peppermints in it but these are one side fuzzy one side flat and I just put them in there flat out with the fuzzy side up it will catch a few bees but once the bees work this in and glue it to the they'll propoliser to the top of the frames once I get that propolized and start kind of chewing on it it'll catch beetles like crazy so I've got some other um tricks that I'm gonna be doing that I'll show y'all later but these beetles are bad this year I'm telling you they it's probably worse I've seen them on this yard this is at my house so I'm just pulling all the stops and I talked with my brother about it yesterday he's of the opinion when you've had hives on the yard for too long though the beetle population starts to build up and I probably wouldn't argue that point with him but I've used this yard for 10 years we've owned this property for 10 years now I've had hives on this yard every year never really had that big a problem you know occasionally we'll get a a little problem in summer or uh after we're done selling nukes but this year's just been unusually rough so that's what I'm doing Beetle control that's my arch nemesis is the small high beetle and when I get that other stuff put together you can't just use sweper pads just on their own but I've got some other things I'm going to add to it I want to get all that done I'll put a video out about it and it probably won't be anytime soon so don't even ask don't even look for it it might be next year so that was the first Hive today that I've got 10 more to go through here right quick and I know I'm going to make some splits on at least two of those hope you enjoyed that and got a little something out of it uh if you got questions post them below and uh get to you as I can thanks for watching so I'm going to elaborate a little more because I didn't explain much at the beginning of the video as to how I lost colonies to adult small high beetles so when I pop these boxes open they're really good at Corral and beetles between the top bars of the frames and the lid I'm not running under covers so the lid is is like that far off the top bars and they'll build propolis Corrals and crowd The Beetles up or they'll Corral them down the back corners of the boxes a lot of times which is they had both in these boxes so if you've never seen 500 a thousand maybe small high beetles in one spot it's pretty impressive when you crack a box open and they just scatter I'm gonna say 500. 300 would be a conservative estimate but but it was a lot so when I pop the lid not expecting that many high beetles I've never come out of winter with this many small high beetles I've been they've been bad before but not like this uh when I pop the lid they just scatter so I've broken a bunch of Corrals I've interrupted the bees doing what they're doing keeping these beetles under control and the small high beetles just scatter all through the hive so they're just all down every single frame and it starts running bees out the bees just get overwhelmed with what they've got to do to re-corale these small high beetles or whatever and on top of me smoking and and breaking the the uh Bridge comb between upper and lower frames they've got drone Brew built in between all that they've got to correct all that put all that back together haul out the Dead so between the damage I do and the small high beetles I lost two really good hives this year two three stacks that could have made um probably eight splits easily maybe more but the the afternoon that I did these inspections there was more than a normal amount of bees just hanging on the box and not really bearding but just piled on the front of the Box above the entrance and across the front and sides of the boxes and I didn't really pay much attention to it I was just like yeah they'll go back in overnight and then the next day when I came out they didn't go back in there was even more bees out front so the the buck of the population of both of those colonies were hanging out on the front of these boxes uh Queen and all just evacuated give up can't handle it we're out and so not and by this time it's too late all the Broods chilled and dead we've had some cool evenings so we've run bees out of a box for that long there's no chance in Saving that much brood so I didn't even try I just scraped the bees into new boxes with New Foundations and let them start over again but it cost me two really big strong uh hives and so I was really just grasping at straws trying to try them whatever I could and so I'll get I'll talk about the peppermint method a little bit which uh amazingly enough I in a you know I'm not saying it works but I think that's what did the trick here so as soon as I knew I had a problem I went to Dollar General looking for peppermints and last time I tried this I got those hard Brax candies this time I wanted them to intake that stuff as fast as possible and hado's big fat round soft peppermints and I was like they can go through those faster than they can of hard peppermint so that's why I did I got the big fat soft peppermints and I stuck them in between frames if they wouldn't fit I crush them down in because they're soft and you can bust them up real easy I stuck those peppermints in every box I have uh four peppermints per box two on the new boxes and and with that with that Beetle load and and the other some of the other boxes some of the single stack or single boxes I had gone through had a pretty heavy Beetle population as well and uh so I didn't want to lose anything on the yard for Beetle issues so I stuck peppermints in everything on the yard two days later I go back and and or maybe a day later I don't know a day or two later anyway I go back and start making splits on other boxes and doing inspections and I'm not finding High beetles I'm finding uh maybe two or three in a box nothing to be concerned about after seeing hundreds and I'm like you know it's not and I'm saying I don't I don't know for sure because I don't know that the other boxes didn't have them to begin with and because when I open these boxes it was late I didn't look I just opened a box of stuff mints in them closed them moved on I had a lot of boxes I needed to to put mints in I'm still not certain but a day or two later one day it was one day later one day later my high Beetle issue cleared up and uh but and yeah it was one day later because I felt the very next day I was putting beetle traps all traps so I like the uh Beetle jails and uh if the peppermints work great I don't know that I can come back every week every week after week after week putting peppermints in because they go through them really fast but or every two week whatever it takes but this time I think it paid off still there's still a lot of speculation there and still a lot of testing to do to figure out did that really work or am I just was were those the only two hives that were just overrun infested so take it for what you will do your own testing please don't take my word that this is the end I'll be out to high Beetle management because I have no clue I just know what I saw this time and um of course you know the rest of those boxes I hadn't been through them yet so I don't even really know for sure but it's not it's not common to have two boxes on a yard that have if I man I wish I could have scraped those beetles into a bucket just to show you how many there were if I say there's 300 I'm under shooting there's three four five hundred beetles in both of those boxes easily so I don't know do your testing figure out what you think works right now I'm just throwing everything at them I'm throwing all traps Swiffer pads peppermints I don't have any oil tray bottoms left or I'd be doing that too so that's that's what's up now hope y'all enjoyed it have a good evening

Channel: 628DirtRooster Bees

Views: 43,409

Keywords: small hive beetle, small hive beetle control, small hive beetle trap, small hive beetle infestation, small hive beetle treatment, small hive beetle peppermint, SHB, beekeeping pest control, Beekeeping pest management, Honey bee, honey bee farming, Honey bee health, Beekeeping equipment, How to trap small hive beetles, How to get rid of small hive, how to get rid of small hive beetles, How to kill small hive beetles, good beekeeping practices, beekeeper protecting bees

Id: 0sFK6VHNGnQ

Length: 20min 55sec (1255 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 15 2023