Small Hive Beetle update

[The Drone Ranger]

I'm going outside. I may be quite a while ... lighting my smoker ...

beehive-igloo_1555142i.jpg
... and finding my skep

Speaking of smokers I tried out loads of different fuels this summer just out of interest.
I tried string from paynes
Carboard
Hessian from Ebay
Fine hemp from Ebay
Cedar shavings from Thornes
Compressed cotton from Thornes
Lighter sticks from Thornes
Old sacking from potato farm
New sacking from potato bags
Coarse hemp from horse bedding
All with varying degrees of success when it came to staying alight without puffing

Value for money and nice smelling smoke the horse bedding (Maxibed) was top although it needs a lighter stick or bit of cotton to get going
The hessian for furniture from sellers on Ebay was next
The cotton from Thornes also is good but dear and burns hot

Not so good` new potato sacks (They might be treated)
Cardboard acrid smoke

[fatshark]

Speaking of smokers I tried out loads of different fuels this summer just out of interest.
Hessian from Ebay

Dundonians should be able to source jute pretty easily ... no need for eBay

[Jon]

Hey Jute, don't make it bad....

[The Drone Ranger]

Hey Jute, don't make it bad....

Ticket to Ride
Norwegian Wood
I am the walrus "experts,experts......."

[The Drone Ranger]

The small hive beetle might have trouble finding a bit of soil to mature in that hasn't been treated for OSR flee beetle round here in the recent past

http://www.nfuonline.com/news/latest...eetle-control/

[Calluna4u]

Dundonians should be able to source jute pretty easily ... no need for eBay

Getting VERY hard to find now. Luckily a scrap dealer who gets me pallets and IBC tank was tasked with clearing out the old store of a disused jute mill, and they had loads and loads of old scrap jute there, mostly old bale wrappers for the inbound jute. He had about four tonnes of it so I bought the lot. This was more than 5 years ago, and I reckon we have at least 10 years stock left, that's with 6 to 10 smokers going in the field each day in season. Was very expensive though, cost me 36 jars of honey to the jute mill and the scrap guy took 20 quid a tonne....delivered. It was all we could accommodate.

At the time there was probably another 10 to 20 tonnes of it lying there. I alerted a prominent bee supplies company to its presence and suggest they buy it for buttons and give out a bag of free smoker fuel with every order above a certain amount. Don't think it ever happened.

[GRIZZLY]

Garden centres are also a possible source of jute sacking - it is often wrapped round ceramic ornaments and pots. I got a large car boot full from my local dealer free.

[prakel]

Hardly an update. but some great videos from Wyatt Mangum (apologies if any have been previously linked):

Small hive beetle larvae
https://youtu.be/DTFZ3ZwIp5Q

Small Hive Beetles (corralled) challenging Guard Bees
https://youtu.be/iHU7OtNM-wQ

Bees feeding small hive beetles
https://youtu.be/LKih6WaYnHA

There's also a nice shb section on his website:
http://www.tbhsbywam.com/small-hive-beetles/
Which discusses a lot of stuff for a relatively short article, such as:

...a stunning version of adult small hive beetle immigration, moving the pest from a secondary invader to a primary cause of colony destruction, of at least small observation colonies (which could be roughly the size of mating nucs). In the typical scenario, a small hive beetle population builds up in the hive with hundreds of larvae as seen above in the pictures and close-up movie clip of the comb. The colony may even abscond. Here large numbers of beetles immigrated in the observation hives and forced the eviction of the bees with no or very little larval production.

[fatshark]

More SHB in Italy this Spring ... 5 adults in a sentinel nucleus. Same area in Calabria ... I think this is the earliest in the year that the beetle has been detected - most previous reports have been September onwards.

[Greengage]

Interesting link tks.