Bees & Beekeeping: Present & Past
Small Hive Beetle Larvae Found on the Bottom Board
With the approach of summer, concern turns to small hive beetles and their microbes, for regions plagued by them. In the Southeast of the U.S. and generally in areas with hot, humid summers and moist soil conditions, small hive beetles can be difficult to control.
Even in the spring before opening the hives, I see dead beetles on the pans under the screen floors of my frame hives. I leave the dead beetles on the pans, letting them accumulate to approximate a minimum number of beetles from the previous fall. Figure 1 shows a tall hive in the spring of 2026, the result of uniting a couple of smaller, marginal colonies from the previous season. Figure 2 shows the catch pan pulled from the back of Hive 40. The numerous black dots are dead adult beetles.
Their scattered-dot pattern across the pan is striking. The beetles get their food and warmth from the cluster during the cold. The cold night would be detrimental to them. From reading the debris pattern in the pan, the colony resided above the upper right corner of the pan. By this time, the bees would have begun brood rearing. The bees should have harassed the beetles enough make them leave the broodnest, forcing them to the edges of the cluster. So why are there dead beetles scattered across the pan in places without detritus, meaning no bee activity above those areas? In the cool conditions, I did not open the hive and disrupt stressed bees holding off a relatively large number of remaining beetles. On my next inspection, the cluster had disintegrated. The mechanics of the scattered dead beetles across the pan, particularly at the rear of the hive, remains unexplained, something to watch for next spring.
Also in Figure 2, the bees have been intently uncapping comb along the left edge of the hive, shown by the chewed white wax (cappings). Bees relocating honey is typically observed in the spring, that is, by directly seeing them chewing open the honeycomb caps, provided this behavior was not disrupted when cracking open the hive. Another explanation would be that if the colony was too weak or stressed from the beetle pressure, robber bees could have been removing honey from a comb on the opposite side of the hive from the cluster. Plenty of robbing occurs in the spring, although it may not be as noticeable as mass robbing in the summer when colony populations are large and bees can fly all day in the heat of the season (instead of flight being confined mostly to warm afternoons after cold nights) …
