These birds will assist us with wax worm removal today.
Recently a friend of mine noticed a drop off in activity of a hive. I visited it about 2 weeks ago. There was definitely a problem that needed attention, but there were a ton of people around. I did not want upset bees taking out their aggression on fellow July 4th party goers.
On 7/13 I finally made it back over there to take a look at what was going on. Sadly it was too late. Wax worms were crawling all over the place. There were probably only 100 or so bees left inside the box.
Clearing silky combs would keep bees from rearing brood, making comb, and fetching nectar and pollen.
More Damage
- If you know how to get rid of this caption box in word-press please leave a comment! 🙂
Initially the plan was to break this hive up and evenly distribute the boxes on the rest of his colonies, but not now. I didn’t want to ruin the day of the other three hives by making them deal with wax worm infested combs. There was no evidence of any other disease within the hive. So what to do in this situation?
Enemy
I chose to turn out the frames. In this case inside the chicken yard. If you leave them for a short while the chickens will pick through everything and remove those worms ya. Then you can melt down the comb. Not sure what happened to this group. I remember this hive was weaker last spring than his other three, but other than that they didn’t seem that poor.
The rest of his hives were doing quite well. They were just minimally inspected by removal of the telescoping cover and the inner cover of two. The traffic at the entrances as well as the tone that could be heard from outside the hives indicated numerous vigorously working bees. All had capped honey in the tops of the supers. At this point of the season I decided against adding anymore. There has been no real rain in months and I don’t want to add undue stress at this point.
What have you done in similar situations?
What do you do with wax worm infested combs?
Leave a comment?
Wow nice chicken yard! We have wanted chickens for a while, its just a matter of convincing the rest of our house that it is a good idea, so many other things to do. btw I would have done the same thing with the infested comb, let the birds deal with it.
It had to be done.
Everyone should have some chickens. You will not need to watch TV if you have em’. It is like a sitcom 24/7. After a while chickens grow on ya. Try to convince them!
We make and can our own broth. It is the best thing for a cold.