How To Clean Frames After Wax Moth
Beekeeping is then rewarding and yet at times, so stressful. It is easy plenty to start and maintain beehives during the honeymaking months. On the other manus, when pests attack your hives, you sometimes have to go all out and "mobilize the troops" to protect them. I am writing about how to clean beehives after an set on of wax moths considering that is exactly what happened to ii of my hives terminal summer.
An Attack of Wax Moths, aka Wax Millers or Web Worms
I don't know how many of y'all have experienced wax moths moving in and attacking your bees, simply if you accept, you volition know the devastation.
Your bees are working beautifully for yous for months. Then blast: one morning time, you bank check your hives and notice sticky dearest, broken honeycomb, and an off-putting smell from your hives.
Yep, an infestation of wax moths. These pests are also known as wax millers or web worms. Discovering them in your beehives is very depressing. As if that weren't bad plenty, one of our hives swarmed final year.
If your beehives get infested, don't despair! It is possible to kill off the wax moths and become the hives clean again.
When are beehives vulnerable to wax moths?
Wax moths usually do their damage in the summertime months or warm atmospheric condition. Usually, very good for you hives with a lot of bees are not every bit susceptible to infestation.
An assault of wax moths starts when adult female moths lay eggs in the crevices of the supers or on the comb of the hive. Information technology may simply accept a week for the moths to devastate a hive.
The larvae eat the pollen and cocoon. As they move through the comb, they open capped cells of dearest and brood. Every bit a result, the dearest begins to spill out. It'due south a very messy affair.
Cleaning and Stripping a Beehive
Terminal week my family unit spent an afternoon stripping and cleaning this year's hive in anticipation of the new arrival of bees this weekend. Believe information technology or not, we found live wax moths nonetheless living in the corner of the hives.
We have frozen all of the frames to kill any of the moths and larvae and and so carefully took our hives apart and cleaned every inch of them including the supers and frame bodies.
We were very careful to scrape and make clean with Clorox all of the hive as well. Nosotros then replaced the foundations with another healthy hive'south frames that already had wax.
We fifty-fifty cleaned the copper tops by scrubbing them with common salt and lemon juices. I wanted to practise an experiment during this process of the cleaning and test how cleaning with table salt and lemon juice compared to cleaning with a shop bought copper cleaner. Tin can yous believe that the salt and lemon juice did much improve and faster!
We plan to move our hives to another location that gets more sun and to plant mint around our beehives. Wax moths do non like mint at all.
How to Prevent Wax Moths from Infesting Your Beehives
Hither are a few tips on how to preclude a wax moth infestation.
1. Make sure y'all have plenty of bees per hive. Combine two hives if necessary. This volition make the hive much stronger and therefore amend to repel the moths before the moths destroy them.
2. Freeze honeycombs before storing, and store them in a cool, well ventilated building.
3. Make certain your hives are tight to preclude developed female moths from inbound or laying eggs between the boxes.
I hope that none of you experience a wax moth infestation. Simply if yous do, just know others have been there before y'all! Have fun making honey! I will be posting my experiences through the summertime of caring for our beehives. Stay tuned in!
Source: https://stacylynharris.com/how-to-clean-beehives-after-an-attack-of-wax-moths/
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