- Good morning.
I was looking through the beehives,
checking their trays this morning to have a look
and see what's going on.
I noticed there's lots of small hive beetles.
And one hive in particular, which is this hive on the end,
the hive beetles are actually getting to the point
where they're damaging the hive.
So what we're gonna do today is show you how to trap
those hive beetles using the multifunctional tray
that comes with the Flow Hive 2.
So, if you come here and have a look,
by opening the the vented cover,
you can see,
the way I picked it up is I could see
a lot of movement in the tray.
And what that is,
is lots and lots of small hive beetle maggots.
It's really quite disgusting,
and what else you can see is
the larvae
of, so it's the
larvae have just started to go through metamorphosis,
and the hive beetle maggots have crawled
through and really damaged them,
and then they get ejected by the bees
and down through the screened bottom board into here.
So, it's not a good thing.
This hive has lots of bees.
If you open the windows, you can see there's plenty of bees,
so I'm not too worried, it will recover.
However, if your hive has not many bees
to manage the situation, then it may go down in a pile of
maggots, which is not a very pretty thing to clean up,
and you lose your colony of bees.
So what we're going to do is clean out this tray,
fill it with oil, and put it back in,
so that we can start catching those hive beetles
before they get a chance to lay eggs in the hive.
You can see some beetles around here, there's one there,
so that's what they look like, little black beetles, and
what they do is, each beetle is capable of laying
thousands of eggs in the combs.
They like to feed on the honey, the pollen, and the brood,
as they go through their own larvae stage.
Then what happens is those maggots usually fall
out of the hive, into the ground,
where they live,
and then eventually emerge as a beetle.
So what you need to do is clean this out,
pour all of these maggots into a bucket of water,
they will then drown, and
find yourself a,
clean out your tray, here's one I prepared earlier, and
then, using any cooking oil, at home, I use the
waste vegetable oil from the chip shop,
because I also run my car off that,
so I've got plenty of that oil at home.
What I'm going to do is simply pour oil into the tray,
filling up each compartment with
just a bit of oil,
like that.
Okay, so once we've covered all the surfaces,
we can then slide that back in.
Now, a little tip, when you slide this back in,
just have a look in here to make sure bees haven't
crawled under the screen.
Now, some hives, like this one, are a little bit sneaky,
and we've pulled the tray out,
and some bees have gone underneath.
So what I'm going to need to do is brush them away
before I slide that in.
And I can see some under there now.
There we go.
Wear gloves if you're new to beekeeping.
You don't want to get any stings.
I'm just brushing those bees away.
And now we're good to slide the tray back in.
Make sure you put your cover back on,
you don't want any bees going into that cavity,
or they will also die in the cooking oil.
So hopefully, tomorrow, we'll see some hive beetles
dying in that oil.
If you come down here, I'll show you what it looks like
when you have been catching some beetles.
Now, if I slide the tray out,
you can see the small hive beetles here,
that are dying in the oil.
So, that's how to catch some small hive beetles.
Now, there are other ways, if you've got questions,
please put them in the comments below
and we'll answer them at the end.
There are plenty of other ways to catch beetles.
I've got a video of how to use the underside of a
cheap tablecloth, which is like a fuzzy kind of material,
and the small hive beetles' legs
actually get snagged in that,
and they end up dying that way.
So you might choose, instead of using oil, to use
a material that actually catches the hive beetles' legs.
Other people use diatomaceous earth in the tray,
which is another thing you can do.
And that's like, to us, it feels like a fine powder,
but to the beetles, it's like glass in their joints,
and they die.
But again, there's many ways to catch beetles in your hive,
but we have this tray now, in Flow Hive 2,
which you can use
the cooking oil method to catch your beetles.
Any questions?
- [Woman] Colette is saying, thank you for showing
a treatment-free way to get rid of hive beetles.
- Okay, not a problem at all.
What I also wanted to do here
is show you the difference between small hive beetle
maggots there, you can identify now.
If, a big one like that,
it's most likely the wax moth.
And you can tell, if you look really closely,
the small hive beetle has a little red forked tail.
The small hive beetle maggot has a little red forked tail,
whereas the wax moth are usually a fair bit bigger,
and they don't have that red tail.
So that's how you can tell, if you're trying to work out
what it is in your tray.
You get wax moth sometimes, it's not usually a problem.
The moths have flown in just to make use of the wax
in the tray, and they're not actually inside your hive,
harming your hive.
However, these maggots have all been ejected from the hive,
fallen through the screen, and into the tray.
It's really nice to have this tray, because,
with the corflute slider in our classic model,
you wouldn't have necessarily noticed this,
because they would wriggle out and into the ground.
- [Woman] Cedar, what do you recommend people do
if they do just have the corflute slider?
- So I would recommend using the
fuzzy tablecloth method, or you can find a tray that's,
whether it's a lunchbox lid or something like that,
which you can slide in between the corflute slider
and the mesh, so you can try catching them like that,
with the oil method, or you can
use the method with the fuzzy tablecloth.
Some people use pesticide traps, it's up to you.
If you are going to use pesticide traps, then put them
underneath the screen, that way, there's no chance
of that pesticide getting actually into the hive
if it rains, and so on, because the last thing you wanna do
is get a pesticide into your beehive.
- [Woman] I'll put a link to the tablecloth method in the
comments.
- Okay, great.
And you can use that, also, with Flow Hive 2,
if you prefer to keep your tray
clean, then you could run your tray the other way up
with the tablecloth method on top of the bottom side,
and that way, your tray stays nice and clean.
It's up to you.
Running it this way up, you do get a lot of stuff
catching in the tray,
which is some maintenance you need to clean out.
You get debris building up, and mould, and it's like
any animal husbandry, if you've got a tray underneath
where they're living, it will get quite dirty,
something to clean out.
Okay, thank you very much for watching,
and tune in again the same time next week.