# OB hive problems / beetle larva



## BuzzKill (Nov 27, 2013)

I am in my first year with the bees. I have two hives outside and then I also built a single wide 6 medium frame observation hive. During the package install on the OB hive I lost the queen and it took about 10days to get another one installed. In the mean time I took a frame from the hive outside of mostly capped brood and installed it in the hive. The problem is a spot about 4 inches in diameter that is slightly thicker than the rest. The bees are hatching but unable to get out of the cells. This is causing moisture build up on the glass. The beetles are also using this area to roam free because the bees cannot reach them. I can see the workers are frantically chewing away at the comb and looks like they will remedy the problem. My question is this: There appears to be 50-100 beetle larva wrecking havoc in this small area. Will the bees eventually make their way there and take care of the problem or could it get out of hand? Should I remove this frame? This hive has only been queen right for a week and it started without comb. I was hoping this frame was going to give them a boast but appears to be causing more problems that its helping. Also when I installed the package all the bees remained at the top so I decided to rearrange the frames by moving the drawn comb to the bottom and leaving one near the middle. The queue has yet to move off the middle frame. Can I coax her down to the other drawn frame in any way?


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## Michael Bush (Aug 2, 2002)

>Will the bees eventually make their way there and take care of the problem or could it get out of hand? Should I remove this frame?

Observation hives tend to boom and bust. I would give them some help before the SHB larvae wreck more havoc. You could just cut out the portion that is too close to the glass.


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## BuzzKill (Nov 27, 2013)

Thanks for the idea Michael. Today I took it outside and cut away the part being annihilated by the larva. By the time I had gotten home from work today the problem was 10x as bad from the night before. The beetle larva had more than quadrupled and the comb was a complete waste in that area. Hopefully this will set the beetles back a bit.


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