Hive Beetlez in the Trap

The other day we were feeding and checking our hives when we discovered hive beetles. We saw them in almost all of our hives, which is really concerning. Hive beetles cause damage to the hive by hurting the comb, honey, and polle. They can also be a sign of a hive not strong enough to fight them off. Simply, hive beetles suck. They are so lame (like goats, as Emmanuel would say). To help our bees we made some hive beetle traps out of any small containers we could find. We drilled holes too small for the bees (hopefully) and big enough for hive beetles. We put a small piece of banana in the middle surrounded by a mix of vegetable oil and honey. The honey and the banana is to attract the beetles into the trap where the oil will drown them. We set the traps and checked them a couple days later. We caught one beetle! Our biggest concern was that the bees could not fit through the holes and drown themselves but there were no bees in the traps so that was great. I think finding the most effective trap will be a trial and error process but these seem to work at least a little bit!

Our variety of traps