Just this afternoon as I was observing the entrance I saw something unusual, I saw a white worm crawling at the entrance of the hive due to my curiousness I opened up the hive and saw numbers of them but they were still few in numbers, I have had watch some hives that are infested in youtube and have already suspected that these are wax worms for I have seen some moths flying around the area and have eliminated some. Beekeppers always want to have their combs free of these wax moth larvae because it is a very destructive insect pest in the beehive. As a beekeeper in the Philippines we have small information about how to treat this but thanks to the help of technology beekeepers nowadays can share thoughts and ideas on the internet. The adult moth is a heavy bodied small moth about ½” to ¾” long, wings vary in color from grayish to brown and the underside is light gray. The mated females will fly into a colony 1 to 3 hours after dark and lay their eggs and then leave before daylight. The eggs are laid in masses and are light in color. Immediate action needs to be taken if a web has already been spun, larvae is described to be fat, pointed at both ends with a brown head and can get up to 1" in length, stay in the larvae state from 18 days to 3 months, prefer darker comb and will chew out oval depressions throughout your hive, destroy the comb and wooden ware, begin spinning a cocoon that can cover your frames. While these wax moth larvae are in the hive there are no chemicals approved to kill them, but if the combs are in storage they use "moth crystals" to kill the larvae but I still would want a safe control rather than chemical control, the only sure way to keep this from becoming a problem in the hive is to keep the bees strong and healthy so they can manage them successfully on their own. Depending on the extent of the problem there are several options: remove the infected super and add it to a very strong colony that will clean it up, place the comb inside a plastic bag and place in a freezer for 2 days. In my case it is still a minor infestation so what I did was I pulled out any larvae I can see and clean out all webs as of what I said earlier that there are only a few numbers of larvae, I was just too lucky to have detected it early.
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A honey bee queen is a chosen one, they are chosen by the worker honey bees when the colony is in need of a new queen, the making of a queen is triggered usually by a combination of conditions such as congestion in the hive and lack of egg laying space. When the first virgin queen leaves her cell two things can now occur, either the first virgin queen leads a smaller swarm from the hive (called a cast) or she locates the other queen cells and kills the other virgin queen bee inside the queen cells by stinging through the wax wall of their cells. Just today I saw a queen cell opened up by some workers and the virgin queen's head emerge, I was happy to saw that scenery but I still had those fear of loosing the virgin queen bee, for the first 5 days of the virgin queen was critical, I lost some queen bee that emerge during the rainy days maybe because when they had their first flight the weather might not be good. A virgin queen as I describe it has a short abdomen and not engorged with sperm glands from male bees. Virgin queens appear to have little queen pheromone and often do not appear to be recognized as queens by the workers. A virgin queen in her first few hours after emergence can be placed into the entrance of any queenless hive or nuc and acceptance is usually very good. I am producing queens using the split type method, it is not easy to split a hive and there is no guarantee, for a new queen might not emerge, might not mate and of course the first mating flight was so critical. I am always hopeful that the first flight of the virgin queen bee will be successful because it is never guaranteed there is always that fear in me that she might not make it on her first flight or she might be killed. As of the splits that I have made in 4 Nuc boxes I already have 1 mated queen, 2 virgin queens and 1 queenless . October is fast approaching and I'm getting ready for their build-up period, dearth period was not an easy stage for the beekeeper and the bees but we are almost at the end of it for this year. |
Dilan's Apiary
Address: Kagudoy Road, Basak, Lapu-Lapu City Archives
June 2022
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