re:SMALL HIVE BEETLE

[rusty]

Oh Dear!!

Now I am even more worried. I just hope that as I live in the North of England I may be lucky, although with Global warming it's much warmer here nowadays. I do hope we can soon find a way of destroying this beast or I can see it destroying all our precious bees.

Good Luck all

Rusty

[Jack Parr]

Global warming???

Do you think that there is a connection between global warming and the small hive beetle?

Do you think global warming is a problem?

[Understudy]

I don't know if you realize how loaded a question that is. Let me place a personal observation here. I blame mother nature.

I mean come on she caused almost all the feral bee colonies to vanish. So man has kindly stepped in and been trying to raise bees. She wouldn't let bees adjust to unnatural cell sizes and let mites become a problem. So man has been trying to eradicate the mites with all the chemicles he can muster.
She let Africanized bees move all over the place. So man has been wearing spacesuits in an effort to eradicate the bad bees. And now that hives aren't in trees or located 30 feet above the ground, SHBs, are moving in. Mother Nature is just a bleep. Did I also mention that she is making the planet a warmer.

You might want to emphasize that above statement with a touch of sarcasm.
Is it just me or is that carpenter, bumble, and sweat, bees don't seem to having these problems?

Sincerely,
Brendhan

PS. when did the censors change a term for a female dog to bleep. Help I am being censored, I am being repressed. Someone call Monty Python.

[downunder]

Small hive beetles fly very well. They are certainly in all feral colonies up trees in my area in Australia. We have inspected over 100.

We have been researching the impact of SHB on Australia's native bees. It seems that SHB is only interested in colonizing bees, not solitary or gregarious bees with individual nests.

Our Trigona bees have a good defensive mechanism to deal with them. They pin them down in resin and then entomb them alive. However weak nests are vulnerable to them and several have been wiped out.

Having said this, this is the worst pest I've seen (because we don't have varroa).

It seems particularly bad in Australia because we have so many feral colonies up to 70 colonies per hectare in some woodlands. These are harbouring the SHB and they re-infest your colonies at an unbeleivable rate.

We cleaned out 10 colonies of beetles with populations over 150 in each.

4 days later the same colonies had an average of 180 beetles per colony, one colony having 560. These were all flying in from feral colonies as there was no other managed  colonies within 10 kilometres.

Personally in 5 years our university has lost over 200 nucleus colonies and 50 double colonies and this is with vigilant weekly management practices.

:(  :(  :(

[TwT]

I have heard that bubble bee's have a little honey stores and SHB's infest them also, I know SHB's can fly 7 miles to a bee hive in a single night, UGA has proved this but cant find the info right now, even if we find a cure they will not leave, feral colonies will keep them and beekeepers that dont tend to there hives, they are here for good!!!!! just my opinion..

[rusty]

This reply is to Jack Parr re; the Global Warming question.

We all know, though some won't acknowledge, the fact of Global Warming.

As far as SHB is concerned the consensus of opinion seems to be that it prefers a warmer climate.  Believe me, there was a time when the snow lay "deep and crisp and even" here in North Yorkshire every winter, but nowadays there are children in our junior schools who have no concept of that whatsoever. A light dusting  to a few inches, of slushy wet snow, that lasts a couple of days, is about it most of the time. Gone are the huge drifts and cut off villages. So you see, if Global warming brings warmer winters, along comes SHB too. That is THE WORRY!

Rusty

[wmarkjones]

As far as SHB is concerned ...

Rusty,

Look at http://www.beecare.com/PestsTreatments/SHB/SHB.htm for information on detection and treatment of SHB.

Hope this helps,

Mark

[rusty]

Hi Mark,

Many thanks for the posting, I have had a good look and will study it later. Isn't that a vile creture!

As you can probably see I live in the UK so I need to find an equivalent soil treatment to Gard star, should I be so unfortunate as to get these wicked things. So far so good, but much like Bird Flu, I think it's inevitably coming.

Rusty

[wmarkjones]

As you can probably see I live in the UK so I need to find an equivalent soil treatment to Gard star ...

Rusty,

Any liquid insecticide containing GardStar's active ingredient, Permethrin, should do the trick.

Mark