Small Hive Beetle in mainland Europe

[prakel]

Chris Slade's latest bee blog (April 12. 2015):

A dozen of us were there in time to eat our picnic lunches and natter for a while before officially starting. The short straw had been handed to Martin Hann, the local Bee Inspector who had spent the last week being updated by his (ex FERA but I can’t remember their current name) organisers at Sand Hutton near York. I informed Martin that because FERA has been sold off by the Government I have deranged my data on Bee Base.

He was full of cheerful news, for instance, although spotting invaders is a priority, their eventual success is regarded as inevitable. Asian hornets are causing much more concern than Small Hive Beetle. Bees can live with the latter but will be wiped out by the former.

He went into some detail about how they act and how they can be trapped in fizzy drink bottle traps. Unfortunately these work best when you’ve somehow caught a hornet and put it in the trap so that it can, pheromonally, attract sisters. I write ‘sisters’ but they may be even more closely related than that as DNA test have revealed that all the (in season) millions of Asian hornets are descended from, at most, 2 queens!

With regard to the Small Hive Beetle, Martin revealed that the Italians have, so far, destroyed about 3,500 hives, but that annually tens of thousands of hives are moved in and out of that area from Austria and thereabouts, which is worrisome.

https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rc...90491159,d.d2s

What I'm failing to understand is if the 'Ministry' are so certain that a beetle invasion and eventual success is inevitable AND that it's not going to be that big a deal once they're established, why does the threat of total destruction still hang over our colonies?

A bit of a mixed message being presented here which might well leave some people making a few wrong decisions when it comes to picking up the phone.