Pests in beekeeping

Beekeeping for many hobbies. Gardeners keep 5-10 hives, and therefore it is easier to deal with pests. If you have a small apiary, then you can fight ants by setting the hives on pegs, greased with sunflower oil. This will help deal with mice as well. Mice and ants destroy hives, especially pests love to feast on cocoons with royal jelly and honeycombs. In the fall, wasps pose the greatest danger to bees. They destroy bee colonies and move into their hives. Birds can eat up to 6,000 bees per day, during the flowering period, so the apiary must be fenced off with a net so that the birds cannot get to the hives. Let's take a closer look at how to deal with all these pests.

Read also the article: what to do if a bee has bitten on your hand?

Fighting mice

If your apiary consists of 100-500 hives, then it will be inconvenient to put all of them on pegs, so you need to use mousetraps or make a rodent trap yourself. To do this, you need to dig a bucket into the ground, placing an electrode or a thin stick with a plate in the shape of a circle on it. You need to attach bait to the board, for example, cheese from the top and bottom diagonally. At the bottom of the bucket, you need to pour 20 cm of water in order for the mouse to drown. When a mouse runs over the board, the board turns over and the mouse falls down. Since you have tied the cheese from below, after turning the board over, the trap is again ready for work.

Fighting ants

Ants are the most dangerous pests for bees. They are especially harmful to young bee colonies and layering. Ants can destroy up to 50 hives in search of food and kill up to 20,000 bees per season. The most effective way to get rid of ants is to sprinkle salt around the nest and along the ant paths. Then the pests will leave the apiary, and you will not have to use pesticides. You can also burn sulfur bombs near the anthill, this also helps in the fight against wasps. The smell of these checkers is very pungent, so they must be used carefully.

You need to burn checkers at intervals of 10 days if you want to get rid of ants.

Wasp control

Wasps love to settle in porous concrete blocks and walls. Novice beekeepers think that wasps kill bees because they want to feast on honey. In fact, the pests want to take over the hive. Despite the fact that wasps and hornets are considered solitary insects, in the fall they unite in a swarm and migrate in search of a home. Therefore, in the autumn period, it is necessary to tightly cover the hives with cloth or cellophane so that the wasps do not get to the bees. In the summer, it is easier to deal with wasps. It is necessary to install fermentation traps in the apiary. Pour a yeast solution into them, to which the wasps flock.

To accelerate fermentation, you can put apple slices in the container.